PEOPLE 

OF THE 



WILD 

BYESTMARS 






Class _J ^?f / 
Book O <J > 



Copyright^ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT; 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 




COAL DEVILS, ON A COAL TREE, PERFORMING CONTORTIONS ABOVE A CLIFF 
OF COAL-ALL IN SILHOUETTE AGAINST A SILENTLY RAGING FURNACE. 



PEOPLE OF 
THE WILD 



BY 

F. ST. MARS 

II 

Illustrations by 

CHARLES LIVINGSTON BULL 
NEAL TRUSLOW AND A. E. CEDARQUIST 




NEW YORK 

OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY 

MCMXI 






Copyright, 1911, By 
OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY. 



Entered at Stationer's Hall, London, England. 
All rights reserved 



B? 



©O.A3002G8 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

A Brigand of the Wild 11 

The Survivor 51 

The White Nightmare 87 

The Master Rogue 119 

The Saint 151 

Flights Abroad 187 

Lone Luck 221 



5 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Coal Devils, on a Coal Tree . . Frontispiece 

PAGE 

A Big, Slashing Goshawk Made a Shift to 

Stoop at Him 17 

Fall with a Screech Among Some Feeding 

Rabbits 25 

Maintained a Hissing, Snoring, Sighing 

Siege of the Nest 31 

So Seriously Annoy a Belated Hedgehog 
that It was Forced to Roll Itself into 
a Protesting Ball 32 

Where Black Moorhens and Gray-Black 
Coots Jerked Their Way Over the Un- 
ruffled Surface 37 

Something Whizzed Within a Quarter of 

an Inch of His Left Eye 41 

Downy One Arrived at the Ghost Tower, 

the Egg Still on His Beak .... 42 

He Came Across a Starling on Top of an 

Oak Tree, " Frizzling " 43 

He Cursed the Deep by All His Gods in a 

Spitting Torrent of Blasphemy . . 54 

Thereafter It Is on Record that Terrible 

Things Happened 59 

There was Chaos and All Manner of Un- 
seemly Noises . 65 

Then He Went, and the Going of Him was 

Amazing 79 

The Polecat Watched Them .... 90 

Passed One After the Other Down Hill . 97 

7 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 

The Fox Had Departed on Business . . . 102 

Landing Him All Glistening 105 

Choked the Cry that Would Have Given 

Him Away US 

A Single Fang of Rock, Crowned Atop with 

Him 122 

His Mate Dropped a Black Shadow from 

the Clouds . 126 

A Buck, Not Horned Now, Came Out into 

the Naked Sunlight 134 

Now It was the Curlew Weaving Space 

Mazes and Yelling Lost Yells . . 141 
Saw Five Great Black Ravens Beating Over 

the Shoulders of the Hills . . . . 147 
He Carried It Away and Hid It in the 

Bowels of a Hollow Tree . . . . 163 

A Raking Form Went By 169 

A Collie Started in to Rout the Pillager, 

but He was Himself Routed .... 173 
Before Science He was a Black or Migra- 
tory Kite 190 

He Knew that a Caravan Meant a City 

Sooner or Later 207 

He Dare Not Take His Eyes Off the 

Crouching, Advancing Red Shape in 

Front of Him 210 

The First Sand Grouse was Down Again, 

the Kite on Top of It . . . . 218 

What He Knew as a " Drummer " ... 225 

The Beast was a Roe Deer 233 

A Stag Climbing Slowly Up the Slope . . 237 
Alone Up There with Only the Eagles and 

Ravens 258 



8 



A BRIGAND OF THE WILD 



A BRIGAND OF THE WILD 

" For things we never mention, 
For art misunderstood — 
For excellent intention 

That did not turn to good, 
For ancient tales renewing 

From clouds we could not clear — 
Beyond the Laws pursuing 

We fled and settled here." 

Rudyard Kipling, 

WHEN you have systematically de- 
fied all authority for two seasons; 
broken every law, written or un- 
written (which are the most binding) ; wiped 
up one-third of the contents of the pheasant 
and partridge nests on three of the most 
strictly preserved estates in England so that 
the united efforts of thirty broody hens 
setting night and day on four hundred costly 
eggs will not repair the damage; spirited 
quite one hundred nestlings into nowhere 
and upset the housekeeping arrangements 
11 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

of twenty-five per cent, of your neighbors 
for a radius of ten miles, you may or you 
may not expect consideration. You will 
certainly not get it. 

Downy One had done all these things that 
we know of, and a good few more that we 
do not, and now that he wished to nest him- 
self in peace, he found that he was far more 
likely to rest in pieces. 

Fate and the ways of his ancestors had 
made him a brigand. Nature had given 
him a garb like the quarterings of an 
heraldic shield, or a pied piper. He found 
no fault with the shortcomings of his an- 
cestors, but he would have cursed Nature 
every day of his life if he had known who 
*was responsible for the silly mistake. 

When you are arrayed in a coat of that 
metallic black which looks green in a half-a- 
dozen lights, when that coat is slashed 
broadly with white of the purest, and the 
whole get-up is set off with an abnormally 
long, green-black, wedge-shaped tail, you 
look very pretty indeed, not to say hand- 
some, but it does not help you to carry on 
12 



A BRIGAND OF THE WILD 

the ancient profession of brigandage with- 
out attracting unhealthy attention. 

Downy One was thus uniformed. He 
had a black, hammer-like beak, strong black 
legs and claws, a black heart, a length of 
nineteen and one-eighth inches, and a sav- 
ing sense of mischievous humor — an elfin 
touch that excused many unhallowed deeds 
and evil ways of living. In a word, he was 
a magpie. No flies settled upon Downy 
One, nor did he let spider's web or mildew 
grow round his ideas. He pushed them 
along. 

All birds live in the strictest sense of the 
word, but I have never known a bird so 
cram full of life in all my days. He oozed 
life at every feather. There must have 
been enough electricity in his being to 
run a sixteen candle power electric light 
for twelve hours out of the twenty- 
four. " Go " with him was the religion, 
and he gave every average Englishman who 
watched him for half an hour the jumps. 
He had no repose in his make-up. If he 
had lived in the U. S. A. he would have 
13 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

figured as the national emblem. In Eng- 
land he was not understood. In short, he 
was a " live proposition." 

The Downy One and his wife— for even a 
brigand must own a wife in the wild — had 
been trying to nest for weeks. It was the 
time of year when the branches haze with 
green and this particular form of madness 
takes birds in the windpipe, or the heart, or 
both, but mostly in the windpipe, I think. 
I say " trying to " advisedly, for their first 
nest in a tree had been laboriously hacked to 
pieces by a gamekeeper; the second, also in 
a tree, had been blown to fine dust by many 
charges of number five shot, and they were 
now seeking a place for the forlorn hope. 

They flew about all day long nosing — 
beaking would perhaps be more correct — 
into every possible and impossible place, 
much to the scandal of other birds who had 
already taken up house-lots therein. By 
the time they had scoured all the woods for 
fifteen miles and had set all the wood- 
pigeons and half the turtle doves in a state 
bordering upon nervous prostration — for if 

14 



A BRIGAND OF THE WILD 

they could not nest themselves they would 
not let anybody else nest — they were ready 
to nest upon the ground itself. 

Then they discovered Ghost Tower. 

If you do not know Ghost Tower you 
will be able only dimly to picture it. It 
stood in the heart of a wood on the top of a 
seventy-foot cliff overlooking a swift and 
lawless river. No man entered it by day 
because it had lately decanted its innards, 
much to the astonishment and hurt of a 
picnic party, and no living man or woman 
would enter it by night because it was 
haunted. So it was, but not by ghosts. It 
had once been a castle and was now a shell, 
with a shadow of a keep, leaning drunkenly. 

The Downy One discovered a great hol- 
low tree growing up within the tower, and 
having dislodged four blackbirds, one red- 
backed shrike, and two kestrels therefrom, 
decided there to build. Built they then a 
castle of their own, a fastness within a fast- 
ness, inside a fastness. As if the tower was 
not enough, and the pestilential chevaux~de- 
frise of a holly tree was not sufficient, they 
15 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

must needs construct a fortress. That is 
instinct; like the machinery of State, cir- 
cumstances make no difference to it. Mag- 
pies had always built that way — enough. 

My, how he worked! for the building 
operations fell solely upon Downy One. 
His mate looked on. She had nothing to 
do with manual labor, which is as it should 
be. They were late. Mrs. Downy One 
said so, and she ought to know. First was 
a foundation of clay and turf, hard rammed 
in. Next followed walls of sticks — care- 
fully tested sticks. Next a lining of soft 
and tender young roots. Next an inner lin- 
ing of silky grass, and finally, if you please, 
a dome, a most military dome, of the most 
pestilentially thorny, spiked, and clawed 
tendrils and 
sticks it was 
possible to 
pick up in a 
day's march. ^MS r> l^% 

Mrs. Dow- 
ny One, sit- 
ting inside, 

16 




A BRIGAND OF THE WILD 

with her beak — her most suggestive beak — 
partly covering the only entrance, allowed 
that it was good. So it was. It was im- 
pregnable. Even the crow and the rook, 
the jay and the jackdaw — all near relations, 
therefore secret foes, of the Downy One — 
could not steal eggs from there. And more 
especially man would not come to dis- 
cover it. 

After all was over Downy One sat on the 




A Big, Slashing Goshawk Made a Shift to 
Stoop at Him 

bough of a dark and frowning juniper, sunk 

his head between his shoulders, and shut one 

eye. There is a tradition among the wild 

17 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

folk of those parts that the other eye was 
never closed. I cannot vouch for this, how- 
ever. Anyway, this was what he called go- 
ing to sleep. 

The wren that said it was time to get up 
awoke him at three-forty with a sudden 
jerky tinkle, but it was not till the first 
thrush began repeating over and over again 
some new verse which he must have thought 
out in the night that the first cold gray haze 
reflected in steel upon the leaves. That was 
at three-forty-eight, and on the stroke of 
four a lark leaped up to meet the burnished 
sun, whose heralds — great, glowing, gold 
and saffron waves — came leaping from 
height to height and from massed tree regi- 
ment to tree regiment. 

Suddenly, as if gates had been flung open, 
a gold and flaming burst of the eastern 
mists, and as though an unseen conductor 
had waved an invisible baton, the whole 
world of green boughs, shade, shadow, 
thicket, wood, and cover awoke in a drown- 
ing clash of massed music playing in the 
trampling, noisy, busy day. 
18 



A BRIGAND OF THE WILD 

Downy One arose, shook himself, gave a 
look in at his wife- — motionless as a granite 
carving — and fled to join in the general 
wild scramble for breakfast. 

The Downy One lumbered in his flight, 
lumbered heavily, as if to fly were to him 
labor unspeakable. His long tail trailed 
behind. His wings — short and somewhat 
rounded — made quick, spasmodic flappings. 
Sometimes, between whiles, he looped, on 
still wings. The sunlight played in purple, 
green, and shot gold burnishings on the end 
of his long, stepped tail. And a big, slash- 
ing goshawk made shift to stoop at him as 
he flew. 

Downy One heard, and knew all about, 
the hissing wings of the slayer. If he in- 
creased his speed he did not appear to. He 
merely said " Chazurk-chazurk-chazurk," 
very quickly. And the amazed hawk hit 
the end of his tail and nearly hit the end of 
his own life on the ground below before he 
could check impetus. 

That was probably what the long tail was 
for. It may have struck human beings for 
19 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

the first time; it certainly did the hawk. 
In motion one is apt to let the eye follow 
the tail rather than the body. Given then 
a speed much greater than it looks, one is 
in aiming — firing and pouncing — far more 
likely to hit the tail than the body. 

Downy One knew all about this, but he 
knew also, that, being a goshawk, this parti- 
cular hunter would give chase. It did; like 
a brown streak it recovered and projected 
after Downy One at appalling speed. If 
the wood was very near, so was the hawk — 
a foot behind, it may be, certainly not 
more. 

Downy One cast one eye backwards. He 
was going to execute some tricky maneu- 
vering, and, since he was playing with hun- 
dredths of an inch and fiftieths of a second 
for margin, a game all his own, it behooved 
him to keep his eyes skinned and mind what 
he was about. 

When the hawk had gained so much that 

its beak lay level with the root of Downy 

One's tail, it gathered itself together for the 

final rush that should, if it got home, relieve 

20 



A BRIGAND OF THE WILD 

the magpie of all further worry in this life. 
It stiffened. It tightened its wings. It 
drew itself in and slightly quickened and 
shortened its wing-stroke, as a horse short- 
ens and quickens its stride when about to 
take a fence. 

Then it sprang — if the term be allowed 
to describe the movements of a bird in flight 
— forward ! 

At the same instant Downy One dived 
miraculously down to the low, overhanging 
boughs that bordered a wood, for which 
wood he had been making. There was no 
pause, no hesitation, between the dive down, 
the shoot under, the instant throwing open 
and down of the great tail fanwise, the al- 
most stunning consequent dead stop in full 
career, in less than half the bird's length, 
and the still more instant shoot up — for the 
tail prevented the impetus expending itself 
in any other direction — inside the hanging, 
leafy curtain to the very heart of the cover. 
Thus, in effect, he executed a V in the air, 
the hanging, trailing boughs filling the in- 
side of the letter. 

21 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

Every species in the wild perfects some 
little trick of chase or evasion which shall 
save their lives in time of need. It is their 
very own, their patent, their sheet anchor 
to windward. Usually it takes a few thou- 
sand years to perfect, and even then it is 
never so perfect that some member or other, 
engaged in what Darwin calls variation, 
which is experimenting, has not worked out 
an improvement. This trick of Downy 
One's described above is the sole property of 
the magpies, who are the patentees. The 
long tail is one part of its machinery; the 
short rounded wings another. The black- 
birds, and they only in quite a small way, 
are the only other birds which use the same 
trick. 

What followed was rather vivid. The 
hawk found himself suddenly alone, but 
that was the least of the surprise. He dis- 
covered that he was looking into an impene- 
trable wall of foliage- — instead of a mag- 
pie's back; that he was going at not less 
than sixty miles an hour, and that he had 
one yard of margin in which to stop himself 



A BRIGAND OF THE WILD 

dead, or — be stopped dead, and that quite 
literally. 

He did not stop. With everything 
sacrificed to speed and armament he had no 
dexterity in this cramped warfare. The 
tail was long but not long enough; the 
brakes were insufficient. The result, there- 
fore, was none the less appalling from be- 
ing expected. 

Wildly wings and spread tail were flung 
out, the body thrown clean up into a hori- 
zontal position, the great clutching talons 
thrust out ahead. At twenty miles an hour 
the hawk crashed into the still shadow of 
the leaves, scattering amazed small birds 
right and left in the process, and vanished. 
He never came out again. 

Downy One, seated on a main bough, 
placidly and as if nothing had happened, 
heard the crash and the splintering of wings. 
His head jerked round in time to see the 
hawk driving helplessly into the network 
and darkness, to see and hear him hit a 
larger branch with a soft thud and fall, 
bounding this way and that, to earth, leav- 
23 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

ing a trail of feathers behind him, like the 
tail of a comet. 

" Chazurk," cried Downy One, fanning 
up his tail and peering impishly down at the 
fallen foe. Then he slid quietly to the 
ground and breakfasted to his heart's con- 
tent — on hawk. 

It was fully midday before the hen mag- 
pie heard that well known cry like unto the 
bleating of a goat and saw the mischievous 
Downy One, a checkered form looming 
through the checkered shades. 

She came out of the nest and fanned her 
tail. He alighted beside her, bowed, and 
fanned his tail like a blackbird. Then into 
the nest she ran. She had discovered some- 
thing apparently, and he followed. Then 
they put their heads and beaks together and 
examined with a great show of amazement 
the egg — their egg — which lay there, just 
as if they did not both know that that pale 
green, gray-flecked treasure had been there 
when they woke up. 

Thereafter they must needs hunt one an- 
other's long burnished tails round and 
24 



A BRIGAND OF THE WILD 



round their domed strong-hold; 
discover insects which weren't 
there, and stand with tails 
straight up and beaks down and 
touching, staring at the imag- 
inary thing; rush to the nest as 
if to go in; change their minds, 
come to anchor on a branch, 
tuck their heads into their; 
shoulders and sink into slumber, 
out of which they would 
wake the next instant to 







™*™nU4&v^St 



Fall With a Screech That Would Do Any 

Ghost Proud Among Some Feeding Rabbits 

25 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

fall with a screech that would do any ghost 
proud among some feeding rabbits and 
dance up and down with evil joy because 
the rabbits jumped nearly two feet, or fell 
backwards into their hole with fright. 

Anon Mrs. Downy One retired to replen- 
ish the commissariat and he mounted guard. 
He knew that every egg meant an added 
danger. Many took an interest in them 
now who before had passed on the other 
side, as it were. On the principle, however, 
of setting a thief to catch a thief, Mrs. 
Downy One had no anxiety in leaving her 
husband in charge. He feared no man, 
God he did not know, and the devil he re- 
garded not at all. He was, moreover, an 
inch longer and stronger than his wife, and 
an inch to these parties means much. 

Once a jackdaw, who lived on the top 
stone step within the tower, flew down to the 
holly tree. He was silent, and when the 
vociferous jackdaw holds his tongue evil is 
afoot. Downy One could see the white eye 
of the bird plainly between the prickles, but 
the eye could not see him. Presently the 
26 



A BRIGAND OF THE WILD 

rigid leaves parted and Jack poked his head 
partly into the entrance of the magpie's 
nest to inspect. Then he went away. I 
don't know where he went, nor does Downy 
One. He did not return. He had felt not 
gently the business of the magpie's beak. 

Gradually evening stalked over the silent 
trees. It was an unpleasant evening, dead, 
dreary, and demoralizing, leaden and lugu- 
brious. A fitful rain hunted panicky gusts 
of wind across the country, and the cen- 
turies-old ivy, the prickles of the holly, and 
the long, low fingers of a cedar made un- 
canny rustlings against the gray walls that 
had sheltered kings. 

Downy One knew nothing, however, of 
sentiment or of association. He might 
have sat in a workhouse hedge as in that nest 
within that tower, surrounded by " Gray 
recumbent tombs of the dead, in deserted 
places." 

The curse of imagination was not his, yet 
he started — started and dropped his head 
low, his beak held straight for the center of 
the spiked portals of his home, poised like 

n 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

a lance at rest, and the ancient stones with- 
out were no more still than he. 

He had heard a voice — that is nothing. 
No. Go you, however, and hear it in 
Ghost Tower, a wandering voice without 
apparent maker, a strangely unearthly, hol- 
low, infinitely cruel sighing, as of some soul 
seeking for it knew not what — the voice of 
the ghosts of the place. 

The voice kept on — sighing, sighing, sigh- 
ing. Downy One's experience taught him 
that voices have a maker and that if one 
" freezes " long enough the maker will show 
itself. He " froze " accordingly, and the 
voice and the minutes went on together. 

By the time the huge, yellow, gently sur- 
prised moon had heaved itself clear of the 
woods and the retreating rain-clouds and 
the last blackbird had scolded himself to 
sleep, Downy One had passed through every 
possible phase of fear and was beginning to 
get back to his normal self again. Far 
away he heard a sound as of a goat bleating. 
It was his wife. She would expect him to 
send out a welcoming answer on her return. 
28 



A BRIGAND OF THE WILD 

He sat still, however; he did not dare inter- 
rupt the voice, but he was very much won- 
dering what would happen when his mate 
turned up. 

Suddenly she appeared, a hurried, beat- 
ing, checkered streak among the trees. He 
could plainly hear the rustle of her wings. 
But the huge shadow that detached itself 
from out the cavern of the blue-gray 
shadow beneath a cedar made no sound at 
all as it flew. Downy One had seen cats 
before, but never a cat on wings; a thing 
with huge eyes that shone and wings which 
were silent was beyond his calculations. 

During the seconds that followed Ghost 
Tower well upheld its reputation. A man, 
a laborer, passing a hundred yards away, 
jumped round, gave one horrified stare, and 
removed himself at high speed. He has as- 
sured me since that he was not frightened. 
He only wished to get home quickly because 
his supper might be waiting for him. That 
was why he ran. 

The shadowy half light within the shell of 
the keep seemed full of bodies, permeated 
29 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

with bodies, playing a mad and delirious 
game of rounders. I do not know how 
many bodies there were ; there seemed to be 
hundreds. I cannot bring myself to believe 
that there were only three. Also there was, 
or appeared to be, at least a massed choir 
of lost souls sighing in chorus, and not less 
than a flock of goats all bleating at once. 
Downy One assures me, however, that there 
was only his wife, a tawny owl, and himself, 
and he ought to know. 

It was quite a fluke that enabled him to 
catch the tawny owl a vicious crack on the 
head with his long, black, straight, and mur- 
derous beak. The stroke allowed the mag- 
pies six seconds to regain their fortress while 
the owl extricated himself from a mass of 
ivy with which he had collided after the 
blow. They did it. They had to. Death 
was at the end of that six seconds. 

Then, for the rest of that night the tawny 
owls, for there were two of them, main- 
tained a hissing, snoring, sighing, hooting 
siege of the domed nest, while the magpies 
sat inside and yelled obscene replies through 



A BRIGAND OF THE WILD 




Maintained a Hissing, Snoring, Sighing Siege 
of the Nest 

the small — most fortunately small — en- 
trance. 

With the first ringing song-thrush note of 
dawn the owls vanished suddenly and 
SI 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

utterly. It was as if the flute-like call had 
been a signal. Downy One waited for half 
an hour, while the tree-trunks facing east 
silvered with gray, turned to pink, to red, 




So Seriously Annoy a Belated Hedgehog That 

It Was Forced to Roll Itself into a 

Protesting Ball 

and to amber ; till a golden beam shot down 
quite suddenly and lit up a thousand glitter- 
ing jewels of dew strung on the grass stems 
within the keep. Then he came out of the 
nest and mocked the singer with hootings 
and sighings which he had picked up in the 

32 



A BRIGAND OF THE WILD 

night watches, so that the thrush fled pre- 
cipitantly and two blackbirds and a horde 
of smaller fry — chaffinches, greenfinches, 
hedgesparrows, and the like — came bustling 
up to know who said " Owls! " 

After that his mate must needs let forth 
a wild squawk, and he must dive into the 
nest to view the second egg, and they must 
both join beaks and stare at it as if they had 
never seen such a thing in all their lives, and 
Downy One must rush out and pretend he 
had discovered another egg — or something 
equally exciting — on the bare grass, and 
down must flop his mate, and the beak to 
beak stare — always with their long tails 
stuck up in the air — had to be gone through 
all over again. 

This they broke off to quarrel violently, 
and chase tails round and round, and dash 
at a turtle dove with a torrent of invective 
that nearly choked that gentle bird out of 
its five senses, and fall upon and so seriously 
annoy a belated hedgehog that it was forced 
to roll itself into a protesting ball. Finally 
the hen-bird slipped back to her eggs, silent 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

as a shadow, and Downy One slipped away 
— also after the admitted habit of shadows 
— to — other people's eggs. 

He dived his slow, flapping way through 
the echoing woods, all throbbing with the 
songs of nesting birds, the good, brown 
pungent damp earth-smell in his nostrils. 

If he left cover it was only for a quick 
dive across some small field. Not that he 
loved cover for itself. He was no bird of 
the woods, but of the oak forests, where, 
each tree claiming an area of its own, were 
great sunlit spaces full of life and sun and 
color. 

Anon he came to a stream, swift, clear, 
and irresponsible. Alders flanked it. A 
kingfisher made an emerald and furnace-red 
splash against the twinkling pebbles of its 
bed, and half-guessed wavy streaks played 
with the speed of forked lightning in its 
shallows. One might, if one was sufficiently 
smart, stop one of those streaks. Downy 
One saw the jeweled wonder in mid-stream 
do so, and saw, too, that the streak had in 
that case turned into a young trout. 

34 



A BRIGAND OF THE WILD 

Now Downy One held that what other 
birds could do that thing was possible to 
him also, and as regards their least honest 
attainments he had frequently proved his 
boast. I have never seen him copy any of 
the better qualities, however, except their 
song. But he did not know that he had far 
better steal a bar of beaten silver than steal 
the living counterpart of the same, a trout; 
was unaware that he who goes trout fishing 
without written permit does so at the risk of 
his head ; and did not realize that though the 
keepers who serve pheasants are one horror, 
the guardians of the finny game are another 
and much worse calamity. All these small 
items he found out later. 

The peculiarity of trout is like the pecu- 
liarity of quick-silver ; when you touch them 
they are not there, if you comprehend my 
meaning. At first he thought there were 
no trout. Then he discovered that he was 
surrounded by them; all lying head to 
stream, all motionless save for the ceaseless 
tremor of the ends of their tails, all assim- 
ilating so exactly with the bottom, as a trout 
S5 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

alone can, that they looked, for all their 
bulk, like lines. 

Downy One jabbed at them. He who 
made his living by the certainty of his aim — 
as much as by the somewhat low cunning of 
his brain — was quite sure that he judged his 
stroke true. Yet there was never a trout 
there. At the fifth stroke he learned wis- 
dom, and a gleaming bar of silver was flung 
high and dry on the bank of young green, 
against which it made a charming picture 
if he had only known it. 

He had just finished his fishy meal when 
it seemed as though the end of a torch had 
been whisked past him with incredible swift- 
ness down stream. A snap of some twig 
being trodden upon gave Downy One all 
the reason he required for this retreat, and 
without waiting to look — lie who waits to 
look in the wild is dead — he fled. A burst 
as of thunder followed ; a puff of dust where 
he had been on the bank followed that ; a vile 
rush of language came after, and Downy 
One, from the nearest cover, watched a 
water bailiff appear with the language. 
36 



A BRIGAND OF THE WILD 

Downy One had by this time come to the 
conclusion that streams held far more inter- 
est than he had hitherto imagined. They 
harbored cover; the bunchy willows and tas- 







Where Black Moorhens and Gray-Black Coots 
Jerked Their Way Over the Unruffled Surface 

selled withy beds were ideal cover. They 
held a wealth of life of their own. They 
were a favorite nesting haunt of a dozen 
forms of feathered populace. He had, he 
considered, not even begun to " connote " 
37 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

the new world, so different from the world 
of his woods and cattle-trampled fields. 

He would inspect further. He did, and 
it ended in a great still lake, a sheet of glass, 
painted — smudged rather — - with green, 
where water-lilies would presently float like 
white and yellow moons, where black moor- 
hens and gray black coots jerked their way 
perpetually over the unruffled surface, and 
where, save for the " blob " of a piratical 
pike and the ceaseless churring of the grass- 
hopper warblers among the reeds sounding 
like an everlasting winding of unseen fisher- 
man's reels, silence had everything her own 
way. 

At least, so Downy One thought. Then 
a great, gray, impressive shadow passed 
overhead and something squawked, a metal- 
lic, rasping squawk, and Downy One looked 
up to behold his first heronry. He saw 
huge flap-winged birds beating in or beating 
out from trees that looked like green watch- 
towers on an island, so tall were they; still, 
straight, giant birds perched on the tops of 
those trees and vast platform nests that 
$8 



A BRIGAND OF THE WILD 

would have formed a foundation for half a 
dozen of his own. 

At first he " froze " — the shadows looked 
so ominous. But it is impossible for a mag- 
pie to remain frightened for very long at a 
time. His sense of humor gets the better 
of him, and he wants to find out, or has 
found out and breaks cover with a derisive 
laugh. Downy One instantly connected 
those nests with eggs. Of course he would 
do that. It was just like his insolence. 

Seeing that his length — tail and all — 
could not squeeze out to more than nineteen 
and a half inches, and the length of the 
herons was anything you please round about 
three feet, the insolence was not small. 
What if he could? — but there! — the idea 
was too mad to be thought of. As if any 
idea was too mad for a magpie to think of— 
always presuming that it savored of mis- 
chief of course. 

Downy One occupied the next many 

minutes in working up one of the thickest 

of the high trees without being seen. At 

the end of an hour he had gained a height of 

39 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

unknown feet, and, as the guide book says, 
" an excellent panoramic view." My, what 
nests! Flight, feathers, and claws, what 
eggs! The nearest nest to him held five, 
green or blue, blue or green, or both, he 
could hardly say which, with no other mark- 
ings. But the size! — why! — they were two 
and a half inches long. What a feed! 

What devil of mischance prompted the hen 
heron in the nearest nest to Downy One to 
get up at that moment and remove half-a- 
mile in order to stretch her legs and feed is 
not known. It was unfortunate, of course, 
but equally of course, how was she to know? 

Downy One saw the five great green — 
they looked now the color of pale green 
water — eggs left unguarded, and the curse 
of his race, the fiend that dogs the footsteps 
and the wing-flaps of all the crows, whis- 
pered in his ear "Steal." 

And he stole ! 

What happened in those few delirious 

seconds Downy One could never say. The 

cock-heron — or whatever they call the male 

of the species — must have been letting him- 

40 



A BRIGAND OF THE WILD 




Something Whizzed Within a Quarter op an 
Inch of His Left Eye 

self down out of the sky on his return from 
feeding. At least, Downy One gained the 
nest coincident with a great shadow. The 
grating " C-r-r-a-r-k " was not needed to 
tell him who spoke. He knew and there 
was no necessity to look up. 
41 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

He pickaxed an egg and fell backwards. 
Something — it might have been a spear for 
aught he knew, though common-sense com- 
pels us to admit that it was the heron's jave- 
lin-like beak — whizzed within a quarter of 
an inch of his left eye and impaled itself 
clean through the nest, and Downy One 
broke for the great green sea of cover that 
stretched far below as he had never fled in 
his life before. This was much worse than 




Downy One Arrived at the Ghost Tower, the 
Egg Still on His Beak 

any keepers' guns, this instantaneous lunge 
of spear-like beak that he knew would trans- 
fix him like a mouse on a skewer if he waited. 
Downy One arrived at the Ghost Tower 
in an ecstasy of excitement, the egg still on 



A BRIGAND OF THE WILD 



his beak, and to- 
gether the black 
and white robbers 
gloried over the 
loot and vowed 
that herons were 
very fine birds to 
lay such eggs. It 
was noticeable, 
however, that 
Downy One never 
visited the heronry 
again— at least, 
not on business. 
Unlike some men, 
he knew when to 
stop, and he reck- 
oned that one her- 
on's egg was about 
his stopping point. 

One day about a week later, when his wife 

was setting on her full clutch of six eggs, 

Downy One was out on a foray, when he 

came across a starling on the top of an oak 

43 




He Came Across a Starling 

on the Top of an Oak 

Tree, " Frizzling " 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

tree, " frizzling." Now the " frizzling " of 
a starling is what he calls a song. In real- 
ity it is an amazing war-dance. It consists 
of spitting out all the sounds you ever re- 
member to have heard in a medley, accom- 
panied by much gesture and violent shiver- 
ing of the wings. It is an odd perform- 
ance. 

Downy One, sitting mute as a statue in 
the shade of the great, grand branches be- 
low, cocked his head on one side and took 
notes. He was by way of being an artist in 
mimicry himself, and took no pride in being 
outdone by a common, low-down starling, 
especially of the purple-headed kind, which 
all the wild knows is an alien — like the 
brown rat — and, as distinct from the native 
green-headed variety, has no right here at 
all. So he began " frizzling " on his own 
account. 

How was he to know that Mrs. Starling 
was keeping house in a hole in that tree and 
that his perfect " frizzling " would bring her 
out of the nest looking for a flirtation or a 
fight, I do not know which? 
44 



A BRIGAND OF THE WILD 

This set Downy One on the alert. There 
was business to be done here, apparently, as 
well as idle " frizzling." He lured Madam 
— surely she was a flirt — to a safe distance 
and then dived for her nest. By the time 
she had finished her — eh — improper amours 
with a starling that wasn't there and had re- 
turned, Downy One — innocent bird — was 
sitting on a bough out of sight of her nest, 
with one of her eggs — also out of sight — in 
his crop, and the cock starling was annoying 
the other birds nesting in that tree by his 
frantic search for a rival whom nobody had 
seen. 

When all had settled down, including 
Madam on her remaining eggs, and Mr. 
Starling had recovered equilibrium enough 
to venture on another " frizzle " — evidently 
he knew his wife, by the way — Downy One 
joined in quietly. Then he jumped pre- 
cisely nine inches and " froze." 

Something had " frizzled " three feet 

from his right ear. Downy One was scared. 

What with the ghosts of Ghost Tower and 

the herons who threw spears, he had gained 

45 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

a frame of mind ready to believe any 
wonder. 

After a few seconds he peered very 
cautiously through the clusters of notched 
oak leaves and beheld, of all things in the 
world, a head, a crested, speckled, well 
beaked, faintly pink head with a black 
mustache, a beak only one degree less 
villainous than his own, and a clear and rov- 
ing eye, a most insolent, roguish eye, an eye 
full of deviltry and all manner of wicked- 
ness. Then if he had not been a bird, I feel 
convinced he would have laughed, laughed 
outright and heartily. He recognized in 
that head the leering, devil-may-care 
cranium of his cousin, the jay. He also had 
come to learn " frizzling." 

What fiends' antics those two were up to 
in the course of the afternoon would fill 
more pages than I have wit to write — even 
if I knew, which I confess I do not. It is 
on record, however, that before Madam 
Starling found out that she was not running 
out to clandestine meetings with illicit 
serenaders, and Monsieur Starling had 
46 



A BRIGAND OF THE WILD 

grasped the fact that he was dealing with 
enemies not rivals and " frizzling " was a 
public danger, no less than six out of the 
seven pale blue eggs in the Starlings' nest- 
ing-hole sauntered — well, into spookland, it 
seemed. 

They never came back, which would not 
have surprised you if you had seen the jay 
hurry away when a charge of number five 
shot cut the branches exactly between the 
two, a great scandal if the man had not been 
a keeper who had been wondering " where 
on earth the darned mags " had been nest- 
ing for the last week. The same keeper fol- 
lowed Downy One on his leisurely way 
through the darkening woods even into 
Ghost Tower itself. Downy One was un- 
aware that his slow progress and brilliant 
black and white uniform enabled him to be 
so followed. If he had — but never mind. 

It was about the hour when the noctule 
bats fly high and the pipistrelles fly low and 
the blackbird scolds imaginary foes before 
going to sleep and the mists crawl up out of 
the damp places like gray octopi and cast 
47 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

their tentacles over the low lands, and 
" All the world a solemn stillness holds." 

" Now I've got you," said the man, as he 
watched Downy One vanish within Ghost 
Tower. He thought he was very brave, set 
his teeth, put fresh cartridges in his gun, 
cocked the hammers — they made a clean 
double " snick " in the still air of the de- 
serted place — and stepped boldly inside the 
keep. 

Next instant his hands were flung up 
wildly, shielding and beating from his eyes 
a thing, a snoring, hissing, beating, tearing, 
clawed, and fierce-eyed thing that slashed at 
the man's face like a fiend possessed till the 
gun went off with a rending roar. 

" The ghosts ! " gasped the man. 

Like his predecessor, the laborer, he was 
not frightened. He will tell you so, even 
though he did not remember that tawny 
owls will frequently attack those who ven- 
ture near their nest when the shadows fall. 
He remembered his supper — poor, dear 
man, so he did. He ran home for that rea- 
son. And Downy One, with his pert head 
48 



A BRIGAND OF THE WILD 

skewed round the angle of his front door, 
appeared to be asking innocently : " Gad- 
zooks! — what is all the bother about? " 

The arrival of that man home, flushed, 
hot, and scratched about the face, was un- 
timely and unfortunate. The scratches 
were, to say the least of it, suggestive, so also 
his refusal to say what had driven him to 
flight — at least he had some shame. His 
wife, knowing nothing of tawny owls, 
thought — naturally, poor woman — of other 
things. So it happened that there brewed 
a beautiful family row, and, while the tawny 
owl was murdering rats in the man's back- 
yard and Downy One was peacefully asleep 
in his fastness at home, the man was vainly 
seeking for that sleep under an appalling 
torrent of reproach, abuse, suspicion, and he 
alone knows what other womanly barbs be- 
side. 

Need I say that, after that, the magpies 
— and their allies the tawny owls too, for 
the matter of that — hatched out their young 
successfully? 

Fate owed them that, I think. 
49 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

And the man — well, ask him, only duck 
when you have put the question. His 
replies are apt to be quick and delivered 
from the shoulder. 



50 



THE SURVIVOR 



THE SURVIVOR 

WHEN the Sadie D. Hartland chose 
to pile herself up on the rocks in 
a gale of large proportions from 
the southwest, she did the job with a whole 
heart. On an evening she was a full-rigged 
ship, superb for the eye to rest upon. On a 
morning, she was — firewood. The papers 
pounced upon her, held her before the eyes 
of men for a week, and then forgot about 
her because a certain prince had said some- 
thing or something else, in a very after-din- 
ner speech. 

It was reported at the time that all 
" hands " were lost with the ship, but that 
was untrue. One was saved and with him 
we have to deal. 

When the Sadie D. Hartland decanted 
her innards on the rocks a box shot forth, a 
big box with bars on one side, and a father 
53 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 



of western ocean rollers, catching it with a 
sonorous gurgle, hurled it high and dry 
upon the gap-toothed rocks. Here it split 
very neatly into three pieces— as good boxes 
will, instead of turning into toothpicks— 
and rolled out upon the naked granite the 
" hand " in question. He was a huge- 




He Cursed the Deep by All His Gods in a 

Concentrated, Spitting Torrent op 

Blasphemy 

pawed, green-eyed, slash-clawed, tuft-eared, 
stump-tailed devil, and the same was a bob- 
cat, which is to North America what the 
wild cat is to Scotland, only more so. 

He shook himself clear of the debris, 
bounced out of the way of the roaring, thun- 



THE SURVIVOR 



dering, tumbling next wave, hauled himself 
clear of that ravening sea on to an upfiung 
fang of rock, and, turning, cursed the deep 
by all his gods in a concentrated, spitting, 
swearing torrent of blasphemy. There- 
after he climbed to the cliff -top and stood 
staring, with inscrutable eyes and restless, 
switching apology for a tail, out upon the 
dumb, dark, rolling mystery of the moor. 

He shook each paw cat fashion, cleaned 
himself as best he could, tested his claws on 
a heather stump, took one last look at the 
Sadie D. Hartland beating her heart out 
in the white smother below, and became ex- 
tinct. That is to say, he became extinct to 
the human eye. To the eye of the wild — 
for not one foot falls in the wild without a 
hundred hidden watchers noting the fact — 
he crouched, slid forward, and crouched 
again, and the heather— with its back to the 
storm— took him in its arms, and he was not. 
An animal dealer somewhere in England 
was the poorer by a bob-eat reported lost 
in the wreck of the Sadie D. Hartland. 

An hour later the bob-cat cast up a glen, 
55 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

still as a backwater, deep as a pit, where 
pine trees whipped and crashed along the 
flanking heights and a stream in a great 
hurry hustled down among the boulders. 

The bob-cat, thinking he could find noth- 
ing better farther on in this new land, elected 
to make his lair there right off, but some- 
thing moved somewhere, and he turned into 
a flattened mystery. Then a hare got up 
literally out of the ground and limped into 
space, a red fox— grinning from ear to ear 
— which had been watching the hare, uprose 
and suddenly remembered an appointment 
in the opposite direction, and a weasel 
panicked past in a tearing hurry. Where- 
upon the bob-cat became as the clay itself in 
stillness, for he knew by these signs that 
some great one of the wilds was at hand. 

Came a sigh and a whisper and a deep 
breathing somewhere in the gloom, and the 
bob-cat quivered and stiffened from head to 
foot. Followed a long, tense pause, in 
which presumably the great one was taking 
stock of the glen. Then something purred. 

The bob-cat may have moved on legs. I 
56 



THE SURVIVOR 



don't know. To the eye it appeared as if he 
did not — as if, in fact, he slid along on an 
invisible rail, and his head and tail and back 
were in line and his belly was on the ground. 

When he stopped, he did so because a 
clearing checked him, and in the clearing 
was the biggest, most evil visaged, slouching, 
slit-eared ruffian of a cat Nature ever made 
a mistake in planning. That was bad. 
Farther on and lying down was another, and 
a smaller one. That was worse. And they 
were making love, and that was worst of all. 
If anything was needed to complete the 
awkwardness of affairs, the moon suddenly 
started dodging about behind hustling 
clouds and turned the world into piebald 
patches that hunted one another over the 
rugged picture aggravatingly. 

Here was the wild-cat of Scotland, the 
cat-a-mount of the legends, which is no more 
than the most wicked catastrophe that hunts 
on four legs. This the bob-cat did not 
know, but what he saw was enough, quite 
enough, and he needed no books to tell him 
the rest. He wished himself out of it and 
57 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 



tried to execute the wish, but a patch of 
light caught him in a bare place and he 
stayed, because in the gloom that followed 
the purring stopped; so did he. 

A whiff of his scent maybe ; a glimpse as 
of a patch of mist drifting away ; a whisper 
from some shifted leaf ; all, or every one, of 
these things may have caught the wild-cat's 
attention. He was in love, for one thing. 
For another, he had ruled over those parts, 
lord paramount among all the wild hunters, 
for many years. All beasts, excepting the 
ponderous red stag, broke trail for him 
when he hunted. None dared face him. 
He was a terror, a nightmare, even to his 
own kind. In three bounds he was close to 
the cause of alarm. 

Then, very slowly, the bob-cat turned. 
His eyes shot green-yellow flame. His ears 
were gone, flattened, invisible. His claws 
unsheathed. His body was a steel spring 
ready set, a dangerous toy to play with even 
for a man. And he stared the wild-cat be- 
tween the eyes— a slow, evil, insolent stare. 

Thereafter it is on record that terrible 
58 



THE SURVIVOR 



things happened. The foxes paused as they 
glided hunting afar, appalled at the sounds 
of that battle. The slow pole-cat — who 
knew no ordinary fear save the wild-cat and 
whose smell is awful— removed from that 
glen in haste. The heavy badger, bent on 
he alone knows what secret errand, checked 




Thereafter It Is on Record That Terrible 
Things Happened 

at the clamor and, turning aside, made a 
careful detour. The gentle-eyed does, feed- 
ing to leeward on the flank of the mountain, 
59 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

caught the tumult from afar and clattered, 
snorting, to the higher slopes in frantic 
terror. 

Everywhere through the wild, as a ripple 
spreads far and wide, the news of the duel 
swept and eddied and half the wild folk of 
the mountain were aroused, watchful, nerv- 
ous, ill at ease, fearing they knew not what. 
All the time the storm roared and lashed 
over the glen, and the turmoil of a worse 
storm, the storm of beasts in combat, came 
back to the watchers from out its depths. 

The she-cat was the first to go. She fled 
without shame, leaving her lord to the bene- 
fit of his quarrel. The sky, however, had 
paled to dawn before he himself, her lord 
in question, followed. And the sun, as if 
on purpose, turned all the gaunt, mist- 
wreathed, mountain-rent, superb land to 
crimson fire. He was a sight for the gods, 
that wild-cat, but not for men. A horrible 
picture, a blot on the landscape, he reeled as 
he walked, drunkenly, numbly, stupidly, 
groping blindly in the new-born light, and it 
needed not that light to turn him red. 
60 



THE SURVIVOR 



The bob-cat went away also, but none 
save a watchful old cock grouse saw his go- 
ing. He went, belly flat, with that lack of 
haste, that extraordinary self absorption, 
peculiar to cats. Part of his left ear was 
not, his complexion was a trifle upset, his 
fur was ruffled, but the working parts of 
him were sound and he had spilt no more 
blood than was healthy. What he had done 
— and this he did not know then — was to 
start a very pretty little blood feud and 
burden himself with a life-long foe who for 
sheer evilness had only one equal in all the 
world — himself. 

Day had dawned. The wild duck, 
streaming high and fast back to the sea, said 
so. The black-cock, calling all the glory of 
the sun to witness that he was without equal 
for beauty, agreed with them. The single, 
lonely old " fourteen pointer " stag, plod- 
ding up to the heights after a night spent 
raiding lowland fields proved it. And by 
all the time-worn and time-proven Laws of 
the Cats, the bob-cat should have found 
himself a lair. But when you have fought 
61 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

long and strenuously, two things are needed 
before sleep — food and drink. 

The second the stream gave. The first 
he found in a marsh under the shadow of a 
hill and much mist. The marsh was given 
over to wild duck and other things of inter- 
est to bob-cats. 

On the sedge-flanked edge of a pool the 
bob-cat made his stalk and the end of it was 
a mallard drake; it was also the end of the 
drake. One moment a full, plump, proud, 
handsome bird; the next, a limp, feathered 
heap. There had come a lightning leap of 
something, a half opening of the bird's 
scimiter wings, a hissing, slashing blow and 
then— the whispering, mysterious, terrifying 
silence of the marshes. 

The bob-cat, picking up his prize, turned, 
and as he turned, he cringed and sank into 
his tracks, lower and lower, till it seemed 
that he must be going back into the earth 
whence he was wrought. Nothing had 
spoken. No footfall had squelched the 
ooze. But the light of the full-eyed sun had 
been blotted out. A shadow had fallen 
62 



THE SURVIVOR 



athwart the bob-cat and it was as the shadow 
of doom. 

The cat's inscrutable eyes flashed upward 
and he saw wings. That was the first im- 
pression the huge shadow gave one — wings, 
vast, rustling, wonderful! The second im- 
pression was of power, relentless, bold, in- 
solent, proud power, backed by the full 
panoply of war, driven by Strength with a 
capital S. There is only one bird in all the 
world that carries that " grand presence," 
that aloof, regal, calm sense of power, and 
that is the eagle. This the bob-cat knew. 
That this was a white-tailed sea eagle was of 
no account to him. It was the fact that it 
seemed hungry that counted, for your eagle 
full is a barn-door fowl, but your eagle 
hungry is a mishap. 

"Errrrrr-pht!" said the cat. "Mmm- 
mmmhhhhherrrr-pht ! " 

The remark was full and complete. Even 
a lamb would have known its meaning. The 
eagle did. He " backed air " and recon- 
sidered, while the cat continued to blow off 
steam at thirty-second intervals. Even an 
63 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

eagle is not above taking hints, nor was 
this one above taking wild duck from other 
people. Till then, however, the other peo- 
ple had not included bob-cats. There was 
nothing in his ten years' experience of a dis- 
reputable, checkered career to cover bob- 
cats. 

At last, presuming on the effect his bad 
language had created, the bob-cat raised his 
prey and edged to cover. He knew that an 
eagle is, if one may so term it, at sea in 
cover, and cover is the bob-cat's realm. 
Then the eagle fell. 

It was as if a young volcano had taken 
unto itself life in that place. One could not 
tell which was cat and which was eagle. 
There was chaos and all manner of unseemly 
noises that scared the wild ducks that owned 
the place into a whirring cloud and jarred 
the other things — rats mostly and an otter 
or two — out of their beauty sleep. 

I do not know what happened in that 

argument. Much of it appeared to be mud 

and bad language. Nor do I know who 

claimed to be victor. Anyway, it ceased as 

64 



THE SURVIVOR 




There Was Chaos and All Manner of Unseemly 

Noises 

65 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

suddenly as it had begun, though how the 
bob-cat managed to get himself and his duck 
into the reeds without being converted into 
strips is a puzzle. He looked much like a 
French poodle when the eagle had done with 
him, and the eagle appeared to have moulted 
at the wrong time of the year. The rest of 
that day the bob-cat spent in the heart of 
the reed jungle and the eagle poised over- 
head for many hours — he appeared about 
the size of a butterfly — looking for the bob- 
cat. 

Toward evening the marsh folk seemed to 
get up and fly about, and one wondered 
where on earth they all came from. Ducks 
of many kinds beat up from the sea — the cat 
could smell the salt air where he lay — and 
the plaintive " wee-uu " of widgeon mingled 
continually with the ceaseless " q-u-a-r-k " 
of mallard drakes leading their people to 
feed. Teal shot athwart the reeds in show- 
ers, like partridges driven hard down wind, 
and geese hurled the miles behind them in 
swinging, far-flung companies, journeying 
from the unknown, Heaven and they alone 
66 



THE SURVIVOR 



knew where, singing the while their grand 
wild song of travel — " Honk, honk, honka 
honk, honka, honka, honk." 

Once a flock of garganey — those beauti- 
ful little blue duck with white pencilings — 
hurtled down into the water like shot, and a 
slashing, raking, clipper-built peregrine fal- 
con, balked by the diving of his prey, the 
garganey, swept to a post hung with festoons 
of green weed, where he sat brooding, a 
savage figure of rapine, in the eye of the 
furnace red sun. Once a little company of 
ringed plover — small and dapper birds — 
drifted by, like a puff of brown smoke, and 
a great bird, not so much big as huge 
winged, dropped out of the sky without 
warning and, passing clean through the 
flock of ringed plover, diminished their 
number by one. 

This bird was hawk-like in his " stoop," 
but in that alone. In shape he was gull- 
like, in color he was dark almost to black- 
ness, and his name was Richardson's skua; 
if they had called him Richardson's devil it 
would have been more to the point. Robber 
67 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

was writ large all over him, and his shadow 
was a nightmare throughout this waste. 

The bob-cat stood up to go. Watching 
other folks hunt had made him hungry. 
He struck a spur of a mountain running out 
like a finger into the marsh — which had 
probably once been a lake — and on the spur 
was a hog mane of Scotch firs. The rushes 
ran up to within fifty yards of the trunks, 
and 

The bob-cat fell flat and stayed there. 
Down the beach, as it were, of the spur an 
animal was coming, and its business was 
urgent and private. It might have been a 
shadow gone astray for all the noise it made, 
yet it was big, as we count bigness in these 
degenerate days of a smitten and attenuated 
wild. Men called it a doe red-deer. If a 
man had seen it then, he would have called 
it a wraith, or a cloud shadow, or a mist puff, 
according to his disposition. 

Once it flung up its head and analyzed 

the heavy air. Once it worked round in a 

circle and confused its own tracks. And 

once it made as if to bolt back to the cover 

68 



THE SURVIVOR 



of the Scotch firs. That was when a fox 
came out of the reeds and ran away, driven 
forth by something unseen that must have 
been watching there. But after standing 
with her huge hind quarters doubled under 
her, ready to go or stay, listening with her 
great ears cocked forward for some time, 
she turned to the marsh and the reeds swal- 
lowed her up. 

After the doe had vanished— about a 
quarter of an hour after— there came to the 
shore of that spur a great maned stag, who 
threshed about among the reeds for some 
time, evidently in search of her, and went 
away again without success. All the while 
the bob-cat lay like stone, and the hidden 
thing, which had ousted the fox, lay like 
stone; neither beast was aware of the other, 
and both deer were unaware of either. It 
was a strange game, this hidden watching 
of one knows not what, but it is a game that 
Nature loves, a game which is played with- 
out cessation in the wild, come winter, come 
summer, come light, come dark. 

As night shut down the bob-cat uprose 
69 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

and slid after the doe red-deer into the heart 
of the swamp. He kept to the path that she 
had made for herself. There was firm 
ground here, if one could jump from tus- 
sock to tussock of deer grass. All the time 
the wild fowl clamored far and near and the 
wind sang strange, weird songs among the 
reeds. 

At last the path led to an inlet, where the 
remnants of gorse and other scrub fought 
with the rushes and the evil, carnivorous 
sundew splashed the ground with red stains 
like blood. Three gaunt, wind-driven 
Scotch firs stood guard over this islet. One 
of the firs was crowned with a nest — huge as 
a wheelbarrow load — and on the nest stood 
a bird of prey — it was a kite, I think — and 
it was asleep. 

One-two-three hours slid by, and at the 
end of that time, the doe went away again, 
and the bob-cat, who had been lying, 
drenched with dew, waiting for her depar- 
ture, heard the whisper of her footfall die 
out into the blackness. Then he moved for- 
ward to the shadow under the firs where 

70 



THE SURVIVOR 



she had spent her time. He knew what he 
was going to find there, but he found some- 
thing more, much more. 

A sound, half sob, half cry, burst faintly 
upon the night. Only quick ears could hear 
it, but the bob-cat heard it, and — miracle of 
miracles — the doe must have heard it too. 
Now, by the lowest estimate, she cannot 
have been far short of a thousand yards 
away at the time, but she was a mother, and 
the cry was the cry of her fawn, and very 
many things are possible to a mother which 
pass the understanding of men. 

Anyway, the bob-cat bolted for the spot 
— it was precisely what he was there for — 
but the doe overtook and passed him on the 
way, going like the wind. When he arrived 
he found an entirely mad doe plunging 
about among the soft bracken and grass in 
the blackness under the trees, where she had 
evidently hidden her fawn — found her, and 
that was all. 

Fawns do not leave the secret place in 
which their mother hides them under any 
circumstances. That is the law of the cleft- 
71 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 



hoofed folk, and he who breaks it dies 
swiftly at the hand of enemies without the 
gates. The doe knew this, and the bob-cat 
knew it, and they were both mad together. 
Only, the bob-cat kept his madness to him- 
self. He had no wish to meet this lady 
bereft of her child ; he had rather encounter 
a cyclone. 

Yet it was he who sought and found the 
trail of the beast that had removed that 
fawn — even he who had spent half that night 
trailing the doe for the very purpose of re- 
moving her treasure himself. He it was, 
also, now so strangely the doe's ally, who fol- 
lowed that trail as only a bob-cat could fol- 
low it, silent, relentless, secret, and terrible, 
the incarnation of the avenger — the avenger, 
strangely enough, for a beast who knew not 
of his existence and would have blotted him 
out in the mud for the murderer he would 
have been, if she had. 

The last the bob-cat saw of that poor doe, 

as he moved off along the hot trail of the 

unknown, was a crazy beast charging all 

ways at once, stopping only now and then 

72 



THE SURVIVOR 



to utter queer little mother sounds and listen 
quivering for an answer. The only answer 
was the hushed whispering of the three tree- 
tops and the melancholy song of the reeds. 

The trail led him across the marsh by the 
way he had come. Later it dived into a 
maze of broken, jagged ravines, where a 
tiny waterfall — a solid column of jade 
green flanked with virgin white foam — 
tumbled out of the darkness above into the 
darkness below, and great shadows, which 
were red-deer, shifted confusedly on the 
slopes at his passing. After that the trail 
struck up to Heaven, it seemed, and he 
climbed painfully to dun, boulder-freckled 
slopes, where the blue hares frisked in the 
moonlight and the air grew very cold. 
Finally, at a mighty gash in a cloud- 
wrapped peak, above all the world, he 
stopped and crouched. The trail dropped 
into the gash, and the pestilential smell of a 
wild beasts' lair came out of the place, 

Here he decided to wait and watch, but 
nothing happened, so he entered. There 
were things in that place, young things, and 
78 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

they mewed helplessly. For a moment he 
had a mind to kill the young things, but in 
moving toward them he stumbled — it was as 
dark as a blank, black wall in there — over 
something warm. It was the fawn, and it 
was dead. That much his whiskers showed 
him. Instantly he seized it and turned to 
go. Then he froze ! 

A shadow had fallen across the entrance 
and two eyes, greenish-yellow, large, and 
apparently on fire, regarded him silently. 
It was the old wild-cat; the place was his 
and the things which mewed were his kittens. 
He himself had never entered the place be- 
fore, I think. It was his wife's special 
sanctuary, so he must have been trailing the 
bob-cat all the time. 

Next instant he lifted up his voice for his 
mate — 'twas the voice of a bad dream, a 
malignant, appalling yell — and she came. 
The bob-cat heard her clattering up the 
slope, spitting fire and brimstone at every 
stride, and her eyes were not of this earth 
at all, but belonged to the Lower Regions. 

Only one thing exceeded the bob-cat's 
74 



THE SURVIVOR 



anxiety to get out of that den, and that was 
the mother cat's anxiety to get into it, and 
between them they put up the biggest thing 
in " scraps " that ever shocked that moun- 
tain-side since the wolves howled in the 
ravines and the reindeer ranged the slopes. 
It was immense, appalling, stupendous. It 
was also quite indescribable, for the bob-cat 
fought both of them. 

By what miracle he got himself to the islet 
in the swamp again is not known. His nor- 
mal color was the color of the mist under the 
trees. His color at that time, and for many 
hours after, was of sunset, and he very much 
more nearly resembled a rag-bag than a bob- 
cat, or any animal at all. The stoat who 
saw him pass and the short-eared owl who 
followed him aver that he was four hours 
covering the down-hill journey from the den 
of many horrors to the islet, and he had been 
only half an hour going up. He crawled 
as an insect crawls, and for a full day after 
any man could have followed his trail by 
sight and at the trot. 

For a day and a night and another day 
75 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

that bob-cat hid his head in some unknown 
fastness on the island. None saw him dur- 
ing that time. In fact, none looked for him. 
The wild folk considered that he was safer 
there— wherever it was— than sliding about 
in the shadows up to Heaven knows what 
mischief, and the longer he remained there 
the better they liked it. 

At the end of the second day, news went 
forth that the new terror was abroad again. 
One, a water-vole, had seen his eyes — balls 
of yellow-green flame — burning dully at the 
mouth of a dim den. Another, a roe-deer, 
had, fortunately for her, picked out his lithe, 
stealthy form sliding silently as a smoke- 
puff toward the mountains. Another, a 
marsh harrier, had marked his passage 
across the marsh by the swaying of the reeds 
as he went. 

The bob-cat had quite recovered by that 
time. I mean he had quite recovered his 
strength and his health, and his appetite was 
a public danger, no less. Only his temper 
he had not recovered. That was lost, shat- 
tered forever, though, as he generally lost it 
76 



THE SURVIVOR 



about six times in the twenty-four hours 
anyway, the loss was not great. 

The day died slowly, and all the world 
stood by, silent, hushed, awed, waiting for 
the end. An old cock-grouse buzzed by, 
straightened and stopped his wing, and slid 
down on a long slant. The bob-cat's 
whiskered face and tufted ears thrust up out 
of the grass, and an odd green sheen drifted 
across his eyes as he watched. 

The grouse was down somewhere out of 
sight over the shoulder of a bluff, and the 
bob-cat removed to that place swiftly. Be- 
fore he got there, however, he made a great 
discovery, and if the ground had been a little 
less hard, I think he would have sunk into it 
completely. A bush swayed, and a mottled 
black-and-white head, with horns in a com- 
plete curve, thrust out therefrom. Sheep, 
telegraphed the bob-cat's nose to his brain, 
and he straightway fell flat. In a few min- 
utes he became conscious of things moving 
all about him, and it seemed that he had got- 
ten him into the middle of a big flock of 
sheep spread over the mountain-side. 
77 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

Now there are a great many things easier 
than lying in the middle of a scattered flock 
of mountain sheep without being discovered, 
while to quit that flock without causing a 
general wild and compromising stampede is 
a maneuver to be marveled at. Yet that 
bob-cat did more, he quitted the flock tak- 
ing a lamb with him, and none of them, not 
even its own mother, ever knew where that 
lamb went to. 

Then he slouched down the hillside well 
pleased with all the world, and especially 
with himself, and then — he shot exactly one 
yard straight up in the air as if he had 
stepped upon a hornet's nest, or awakened 
a viper, and the yell that he let forth made 
k one's hair stand up. Then he went, and the 
going of him was amazing. He just went 
off like a squib, and hissing much worse than 
any squib, and he — well, he was not. 

There was a trap, and the trap was spe- 
cially placed to entertain the foxes. If the 
lamb had not been a heavy one, the bob-cat 
would not have trailed half of it on the 
ground, and the man who set the trap would 

78 



THE SURVIVOR 




Then He Went, and the Going op Him Was 
Amazing 

have caught a very fine bob-cat and a tartar 

to boot. As it was, he caught the lamb, but 

79 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

since that poor little fluffy one was already- 
dead it did not make much difference. 

When he had cooled off a bit, so to speak, 
the bob-cat ceased galloping and swearing 
and began to feel hungry instead. Wan- 
dering deviously in search of a meal, he 
climbed to the up-flung crest of a mountain 
and there he fell among a new and strange 
people. 

A raven, almost as black as its own black 
heart, crowned a pinnacle and cursed him 
in an unknown and unholy tongue. On 
every rock perched a cock-ptarmigan, and 
their hen birds must have been all around, 
though neither he nor any other beast was 
gifted with the eyes to unravel them from 
their surroundings, while blue hares limped 
and sat about in all directions and said noth- 
ing at all. 

The bob-cat stalked a blue hare most 
stalkily, but a ptarmigan got up just out of 
paw's reach and gave him away. Then he 
stalked the ptarmigan, and a raven — who 
had visions of getting what the bob-cat was 
pleased to leave — came and croaked over his 

80 



THE SURVIVOR 



head so excitedly and idiotically that the 
ptarmigan thought something must be 
wrong somewhere and invited himself into 
space. Then the bob-cat, in despair, stalked 
the raven, after that knowing one had set- 
tled again, and the raven waited till he was 
just about to spring before rising twenty 
yards in the air and hurling evil gibes at him. 
Then he lost his temper, and the stupefied 
raven fled to the next mountain, and the blue 
hares went out of sight over the crest and 
did not return, and the ptarmigan became 
scarce in the clouds that wrapped the place 
about. 

It is a terrible thing, the losing of a 
temper. The bob-cat did it thoroughly. 
There was none of your stoic Indian calm 
about him; he exploded in yells at fifteen- 
second intervals, and when he wasn't yelling 
he was digging his dagger-like claws into 
the good earth and snarling and spitting 
like a locomotive on an up-grade. And 
he bounded six feet at a bound, slashing 
whistling, wicked slashes with his big sug- 
gestive paws at the empty air. 
81 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

Anon he was crouching flat-bodied, flat- 
eared, calling all the imperious, silent, proud 
peaks to witness his hard luck. Then he 
cast his eyes down the giddy slope, and it 
was as if a hand had passed over him, turn- 
ing him to stone. 

A form, dim and phantom-like, drifted 
through the mist below, drifted and passed 
from sight like a gray ghost. It was the 
she wild-cat. She was out on a hunting 
foray, and behind her came another gray 
shadow, which the bob-cat knew was her 
mate, though he was most like a patch of 
mist that had detached itself from the sur- 
rounding mist and floated away. 
k For five minutes after they had gone the 
bob-cat remained still and dumb as a statue. 
Then with a jerk of his bob-tail he flung 
about and traveled swiftly down hill at the 
unmistakable slouching trot of all the cats. 
He had work to do, dangerous work, work 
that only one of all the wildf oik in that land 
dared to attempt, and that one was himself. 

He reached the gash in the mountain peak 
t where the wild-cats lived. He passed 



THE SURVIVOR 



within; silence there, nothing more. He 
had come for the kittens, to kill them, be- 
cause he was hungry, for one reason, and 
because they belonged to his foe of foes, for 
another. 

In the blanketing blackness of the place 
he stood quite still, and somewhere far away 
on a distant hill a shot sounded, short, 
slapping, vicious, the unmistakable report of 
a rifle; but here, in this den of thieves, out- 
side, all around, was stillness, dead and 
dumb, the silence of a tomb. 

The kittens were gone, spirited away by 
their mother, to a safer place perhaps. 
Maybe she had killed them, or their father, 
that diabolical ruffian of the slit ears, per- 
haps — but who can tell? Such things have 
been, and the day of understanding for us 
mortals is not yet. 

The bob-cat swore softly and wickedly 
under his great bristling whiskers — and the 
swear was almost exactly duplicated from 
the outside. Why the " Tom " wild-cat had 
chosen that moment to return to that place 
is a puzzle known only to himself. Nor is it 
83 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

apparent why he swore, seeing that by that 
time he must have had a very exact and 
lively knowledge of the big foe's capabili- 
ties. 

The bob-cat went out over his enemy's 
head, exactly as if he had been propelled 
violently from within by a spring. It was 
a grand leap and it cleared the wild-cat by 
just one foot. I think the bob-cat expected 
the mother of those kittens, and he was not 
anxious to meet her plus her husband again. 
When, however, he found that she was no- 
where in sight, he dealt with the wild-cat 
swiftly and to the purpose. 

The she-cat heard the unlovely riot from 
afar and returned at a speed much faster 
than you would ever have suspected her 
capable of. The first thing she saw was her 
lord stretched out in quite a picturesque 
attitude, and she knew at a glance what was 
ailing him. It was death that ailed him. 
The next thing she noticed was the bob-cat 
— she could only see his head and his unfor- 
gettable eyes — staring at her over the carcass 
of her husband. The third thing she 
84 



THE SURVIVOR 



noticed was the fact that the bob-cat was not 
looking at her at all, but past her, over her 
head, down hill, and, for the first and last 
time in her life, she saw fear in his eyes. 

Then it seemed to her that his grim mask 
receded suddenly backward, like a face in a 
dream, receded and went out in the gather- 
ing mist, silently without warning, un- 
cannily. The next instant she doubled 
upon herself, and the clear, sharp, kicking 
reports of two rifles rang out as she did so. 
She collapsed where she stood, got up again, 
took three strides in another direction— 
evidently the direction of the new lair in 
which she had hidden her young — collapsed 
again, and lay quite still. 

Two keepers rose from behind some 
rocks and came up the slope without hurry, 
as without comment; they were Scotch. 
One of them tells me that he must have 
wounded the bob-cat unto death because no 
one ever saw him again. But that is no 
reason at all. 



85 



THE WHITE NIGHTMARE 



THE WHITE NIGHTMARE 

ON one side was a wood, and because 
it was of spruce-fir it was thick with 
low-hung boughs in place of brush- 
wood, and was filled with a thicker silence. 
On the other side a slithery slope, like unto 
the roof of a house for steepness, dotted 
with many boulders that seemed to hold 
their places by a special dispensation of 
Providence only. Then, lest any find the 
scene too cheerful, came a beast of strange 
aspect and stood 'twixt wood and slope. 

They said this beast came from a hole in a 
" cairn " on the mountain. Perhaps — but 
he looked as if he had come from a place 
much deeper than any hole. Nature had 
given him a long body of wonderful twist- 
fulness, then, forgetting what she had done, 
added legs two sizes too short. Then she 
went away, and Satan, coming along, 
89 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

finished the job. He added a head — surely 
no one save he could have evolved such a 
head — that had a sharp muzzle, and upright, 
rounded, short ears, a head shaped like a 
wedge, and gave to it an expression 
genuinely diabolical. For color he chose a 
grim brown-black. Later he added an un- 




The Polecat Watched Them 

quenchable thirst for something much less 
innocent than water and an odor which 
would spoil the best appetite for a week. 
Finally, lest all the wild folk turn and 
abolish it, he struck fear out of its composi- 
tion and added teeth like stilettos set on end. 
90 



THE WHITE NIGHTMARE 

Men called this tragedy a polecat, and 
then, as if to contradict the title, placed it at 
the head of the weasel tribe, where it stands 
to this day. 

Six grouse — red grouse — burst over the 
place like shells, and dropped in a heap 
over a heather-mantled ridge. The polecat 
watched them. There are many things 
worse than grouse to eat and very many 
things easier to catch, for an old cock grouse 
knows all that anyone can teach him about 
keeping out of harm's way, and a bit over. 
Polecats, however, are not met every day — 
or every year, for the matter of that — and 
their ways of hunting are not those of every 
wild hunter. 

He moved to that ridge. I say " moved " 
because the gait of a polecat is — well, the 
gait of a polecat. It is all his very own — 
and the rest of his tribe's. It is not walk- 
ing, or running; galloping would not de- 
scribe it; nor is it a canter. It resembles 
the going of a snake as much as it resembles 
anything at all. 

The grouse were feeding well in the open, 
91 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

having no desire to feed anything else in 
their turn; also they kept there. There 
was no chance of their working nearer as 
they fed. And the polecat — twisted among 
the twisted stems of heather — anathema- 
tized them from afar. That occupation did 
not— as it does with some people— prevent 
him from thinking, however, and the result 
was about the strangest sort of polecat those 
grouse ever clapped eyes upon. 

He turned acrobat, that polecat, and 
contortionist, and many other things that 
are without a name. What the grouse saw 
was a twisting, twining, twirling, tottering, 
tumbling, trembling tom-fool of a thing, 
and, being grouse, they were forthwith eaten 
up with curiosity — and they stayed. That 
the entirely unknown and unaccountable 
apparition was drawing nearer with every 
contortion did not strike them. They 
simply stood and stared, a fat-cheeked, fowl- 
like stare, and the polecat, who was tempor- 
izing — and extemporizing — calculated each 
display to bring him at least an inch closer 
to his prey. It was hard work, and it was 
92 



THE WHITE NIGHTMARE 

also quite a close thing as to which would 
give out first, the birds' curiosity, or the 
polecat's breath. 

Followed a jump, a squawk, a great con- 
floption of feathers, and the grouse came 
back to things earthly with a jerk. Five of 
them shot into the distance and one of them 
shot into— oblivion. The polecat had him 
by the neck, and when a polecat gets his 
teeth that way the owner of that neck may 
as well say his prayers very quickly indeed. 
Then that polecat dined after the manner of 
his kind, which means that he took so little 
that it seemed a pity to have killed the bird 
at all, and certainly not worth all that back- 
aching trouble. 

Now, when you have just jumped flop 
into the dinner of a grouse family and have 
forcibly, not to say roughly, detained one 
member of that family for your own dinner, 
you expect to lose the pleasure of their com- 
pany for at least a day. Therefore, when 
that flock come back from over the superb, 
tumbled, rolling riot of mountain, hill, and 
heather, and drop like stones within ten 
93 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

yards of you, you naturally want to know 
what on earth, or under it, has gone wrong 
with nature. 

The polecat yanked his flat head around 
and looked at those grouse as one would look 
at a madman, and the grouse said never a 
word, but flattened and looked, not at the 
polecat, if you please, but at the sky. There 
was the rub. They looked at the sky in- 
stinctively because they were birds, and the 
animal did not. Why he did not I cannot 
tell you, nor can anyone else. It is a fact 
that animals seldom look up, and the reason 
for such an omission is, as yet, beyond the 
knowledge of man. 

Then it seemed as if a small-sized riot had 
begun on the giddy slope aforementioned. 
Someone on that slope was using language 
quite unfit for print, chattering obscenely, 
and the sound appeared to have electrified 
the polecat. Round jerked his snaky head 
and after the head flung the sinuous body. 
It was as if someone had cried " Murder." 
In a flash he was over that ridge, pounding 
along at his indescribable leaping, rippling 
94 



THE WHITE NIGHTMARE 

double. He knew that voice, you see; had 
good cause to know it, for it was the voice 
of his mate. 

He found her, and she was a sight to 
make one hold one's breath. Her face was 
the face of a bad dream, no less, and her 
eyes shone red — wickedly, fiendishly red — 
like rubies with a fire behind them, and she 
jibbered. Round her were gathered her 
two young, and I give you my word those 
young were not beautiful, but workmanlike, 
very workmanlike. 

Now that polecat had left his mate with 
three young, not two. The third? Where 
was that third baby horror? The wind 
imitated the sounds of a low tide on a dis- 
tant beach. A jay screeched from some- 
where in the wood, a harsh, annoying 
screech. A raven croaked, an odd, snor- 
ing croak of evil omen, from a neighboring 
boulder, but they gave no answer to the 
dumb question. 

Then the polecat dropped his nose and 
hunted as a hound hunts, with all a hound's 
keenness of smell and twice its cunning. 
95 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

He was slow, perhaps, painfully slow, but 
— well, ask any mountain hare as to the sure- 
ness of his tracking, and, if it does not faint 
at the mention of his name, it will tell you 
that his tracking is sure as death itself. 

He picked up the trail of his lost son in 
the wood, followed it to the slope, threaded 
it to a bush under which a stream was born, 
and then — nowhere. It just went out, died, 
as if the owner had taken unto itself wings 
and flown away. This kind of thing is not 
customary in the wild, you understand. It 
is a canon that if you follow a beast's trail 
long enough you come to the beast. Nor 
can any animal very well miss the trail of a 
polecat, for the scent of these animals is a 
very shocking stink. Yet the old polecat 
flung up his head quite suddenly and finally. 
His son had apparently sauntered into 
Spookland. 

It was a little thing, perhaps, no more 
than a claw-mark in the soft earth where 
the stream — that nature had destined to be 
a mighty river further down — trickled forth, 
but it explained everything. The sight of it 
96 



THE WHITE NIGHTMARE 



turned the polecat to stone, and the setting 
sun turned him to blood-red stone, with 
bronze where the creases were, and the re- 
sult was a picture that a painter would have 







w % 




Passed One After the Other Down Hill 

given a year of his life to copy faithfully. 

Beside the mark of this claw were the 

round imprints of his son's paws, and all 

97 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

four of them could have been placed within 
the imprint of that huge claw, the claw of a 
bird without a doubt — but, ye gods, what a 
bird! 

However, since the son had gone, and the 
unknown slayer had gone (taking the son 
with him, one presumes), and the grouse, 
and blackcock, and ptarmigan had gone — 
to sleep — and the sun was evidently just 
about to go, there was nothing for a polecat 
to do but to go too. 

He went, that polecat, very silent, and 
very angry, and doubly watchful, through 
the deepening gloom, and the mist, that 
lived in the ravines and hollows and damp 
places by day, rose up and swirled about 
him. Owls came out and hooted, barked, 
shrieked, or snored at him, according to their 
species. A heron flapped homeward, shout- 
ing at the night his rancorous, bad-tempered 
shout, and the badgers — low, gray shadows 
in the mist — passed one after the other 
down-hill, on secret errands bent. 

Then nature suspended in the void a 
great, round moon, shedding a light all the 
98 



THE WHITE NIGHTMARE 

more brilliant because of the mist, strange 
though this may sound to a townsman. 
And the polecat put up a hare. 'Twas a 
small matter, to put up a hare. There were 
plenty of them in this place, the finiking, 
limping blue hares of the mountains. He 
dropped his head, picked up the trail, and 
gave chase with a dumb persistence that 
looked bad for that hare. 

There was no hurry about this beast. It 
is never he that is certain who hurries. The 
end was known to him already and to the 
hare ; at least, they thought it was, for when 
a polecat fixes to the trail of a beast he 
might just as well be fixed to the beast's 
throat for all the chance it has of getting 
away. 

You know how a hare can run, with or 
without cause ; how she eats up the miles, as 
a child eats up sweets, and walks into the 
background before you are aware. That 
hare did not. If a fox had given chase she 
would have slid into the next county without 
thought, but the fox would have hunted 
full speed and lost the scent or given up in 
99 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

disgust. This thing, this low, slow horror, 
this polecat, moved no faster than a man 
might trot slowly, but he would stick to the 
scent till the Day of Judgment or dawn 
came to stop him. This the hare knew. 
She knew that no speed would disgust him, 
and she was equally certain that she could 
not " stay " till dawn— or the Day of Judg- 
ment, either, for the matter of that. There- 
fore terror seized her like unto a palsy, turn- 
ing her blood to water, weighting her limbs 
with lead, numbing her, and dropping her 
speed till a terrier, aye, even a dachshund 
would have laughed at it. 

Then something unforeseen happened, 
and for the second time that night the pole- 
cat stopped dead on a trail that stopped, 
even deader. For the second time that 
night, also, he flung up his head quite sud- 
denly, whimpering an odd little whimper — 
almost of anguish, it seemed — on a trail that 
died into the earth, or air, and went out like 
a snuffed candle. And for the second time 
that night, too, he found himself staring at 
a claw-mark, huge, forbidding, uncanny, 
100 



THE WHITE NIGHTMARE 

the footprint of a bird, it seemed, in every- 
way identical with the one that had cut his 
son's trail— and his life— off short in the 
beginning. 

There was something oddly stupid in the 
way the polecat stared blankly at that claw- 
mark, for an animal at a loss for the reason 
of a thing is either oddly stupid, or fright- 
ened, and a polecat, so it seems, cannot be 
frightened. He knew, he must have known, 
that before him was the claw-mark of a bird, 
yet, even then, he did not for some seconds 
look up, so strong is this habit — curse one 
might almost call it — that is laid upon all 
the four-footed ones. 

About this time the polecat became aware 
of eyes, two in number, not smaller than a 
marguerite, and they were on fire, those 
eyes, so that they flashed and in them was 
the cruelty and cold ferocity of several 
fiends. Behind the eyes was something, he 
could not tell quite what, a shadow, a spook, 
a great white shape or ghost, which flapped 
and flapped and never said a word. 

The polecat is a slow beast as the wild 
101 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

folk go, and fear was eliminated from his 
composition by the — never mind. He had, 
however, as much love for his own life as 
any of us, perhaps because he and death so 
often met. Therefore he became a contor- 
tionist and acrobat for the second time, with 
the tables reversed, and found himself — 
goodness and himself alone know how he 
got there — behind a boulder. From the 
boulder to a heather-patch was the matter of 
a leap, and from the heather-patch to the 
cairn of stones in the spruce-fir wood where 
he lived, the matter of about the fastest 
thing in running — or whatever he called his 
peculiar gait — that he had ever found it nec- 
essary to put up. He did not look round 
once. Indeed, he had quite enough to do to 
keep his feet in the blind smother of herbage, 
but once he felt something fan the back of 
his neck and it was as the breath from the 
grave. 

Next evening, after the fox had departed 

on business, but before the badger had 

shoved his gray snout out of the " cairn " — 

it had many lodgers, that " cairn " — the 

102 



THE WHITE NIGHTMARE 




The Fox Had Departed on Business 

polecat went forth to appease a terrible 
hunger. He went first, however, to drink 
from a stream that meandered chuckling, al- 
ways chuckling, through the cathedral 
shades of the wood. The sun had almost 
burned out as he lifted his flat head and 
turned to go. 

Then his eyes fell upon something about a 
yard away. It was a smudge, an unclean 
blot, the spot where a bird — presumably a 
grouse which had come to that place for 
water — had been violently done to death. 
Such sights are not uncommon in the wild. 
Beasts must live, and they are not all made 
alike, but — and here the polecat relapsed 
into cover as if he had been fired at — this 
particular blot had by the side of it the claw- 
10S 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

mark of a bird. The polecat knew what 
that meant, or rather he did not know what 
it meant, but would very much have liked 
some one to tell him. It was the same claw- 
mark as the one he had beheld the night be- 
fore, and it could not be considered a good 
omen on which to begin a night's hunting. 

There was a river not far away, broad 
and flat-bottomed, not particularly fast, as 
hill rivers go, but shallow and haunted by 
the lordly trout. Into this river the pole- 
cat slid, not indeed as to the manor born, 
but as to the manor trained. The trout is 
no flat fish to be walked up on a flat bottom. 
He lies head to swell, and he sees you first 
every time. There is no bluff about the 
trout. He throws his stake on speed, and in 
nine cases out of ten the quickness of the 
fish deceives the eye. 

The polecat put up such a trout, cut him 
off from open water, headed him into a shal- 
low, and, after half an hour's fancy dancing, 
landed him all glistening to flash back the 
silver moon. In that hour he fed as a king 
feeds, with all due regard to the sensation 
104 



THE WHITE NIGHTMARE 

his appearance created along the bank. All 
members of the weasel tribe love to cut a 
figure, I think ; to rouse the town, as it were ; 
tp know the terror of their own name. 




Landing Him All Glistening 

The rabbits and the voles— water and field 
—were hopping about with fright, and the 
moorhens, and coots, and others of the river 
birds were dancing can-cans of horror; 
while the rats, the rowdy, low ruffians that 
105 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

haunt every river front, turned fairly giddy 
with fear and went about yammering in- 
sanely as if dazed. All because they had 
seen, and, worse still, smelt that double- 
dyed slayer, the polecat. They knew it was 
he, because although the moon — who is the 
mother of shadows — may even deceive the 
quickness of a trained wild eye, there is no 
mistaking that deadly, sickly, concentrated 
essence of stink, which is peculiar to the 
polecat, and — thank Heaven — to him alone. 

All at once the whole company " froze,'' 
became stiff and rigid with a very sudden 
rigidity. It was as if a Voice had bid them 
be still, and still they were as death. There 
are two kinds of fear in the wild. One pro- 
duces movement and sound. The other 
produces stupor. Evidently the latter, and 
greater, fear was at hand. 

The polecat did not deal much in fear 
himself, save to dispense it, but he had never 
dispensed fear like that. Then something 
fell with a thud out of the night, fell and 
was still. The polecat crouched, his little 
red eyes fixed upon the thing, a dim blotch 
106 



THE WHITE NIGHTMARE 

among the grass blades, but the thing did 
not get up and walk away as he expected. 
It had done with movement forever. 

Then the water birds, who had been the 
first to crouch, got up and went away very 
quietly and without remark, almost as if 
they held one claw up to their beak. The 
rabbits and the rats followed, faded back 
into the shadows that had given them birth, 
and they, too, said nothing at all. The pole- 
cat was alone, alone in all that half-sug- 
gested silent world, where the moonlight 
showed so little and the darkness hid so 
much. 

It was the curiosity which is part of the 
heritage of the weasel tribe that prompted 
him to get up and go to look at that dim 
something lying huddled in the silver grass. 
He stood a yard away and sniffed — one sniff 
only. 

If a galvanic battery had been at that 
moment started under his feet he would 
have — well, acted as he did. Every hair 
on his body sat straight up, and under it the 
loose skin rippled, and the sound that came 
107 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

from his mouth was not the sound of a sane 
animal at all. He swore strange and ter- 
rible things in a sudden wild gibber, execut- 
ing the while a mad dance for the space of 
one minute. Then he went, not slowly and 
quite blindly, into the night, still gibbering 
as one who is in pain, or mad, or both. 

And the thing which lay on the ground 
never said a word. It was a young pole- 
cat — his young polecat, and on its shoul- 
der lay a single feather, a large soft feather, 
white with the whiteness of driven snow. 
No wonder he gibbered, that polecat. Im- 
agine one's only daughter descending from 
the clouds and for the best of reasons of- 
fering neither explanation nor apology for 
1 the miracle. If anything was needed to 
complete the surprise, that feather smelt 
as the claw-mark had smelt, had come 
from the same bird, or spook, or devil, or 
whatever it was that sailed about the night 
sky and worked unholy miracles. It was 
to be presumed that that same spook thing 
had carried off his young one and dropped 
it by chance while passing above him; at 
108 



THE WHITE NIGHTMARE 

least, that seemed the most natural theory. 

After that the thing became a nightmare, 
and a bad one at that. Those wretched 
claw-marks seemed to haunt the polecat 
wherever he went, till he almost came to look 
for them. Everywhere in the soft ground 
they showed, and always where some bird 
or beast had been violently done to death 
and eaten on the spot. 

One night, while loafing along a string of 
marshy pools where the resplendent wild 
duck was wont to feed — and feed him, upon 
occasion — he became aware of a small-sized 
riot opening up from the mist-hung dark- 
ness of the largest pool of all. Something 
was in trouble there, so that it squawked 
aloud in a wild and public-spirited fashion. 
Three wild duck got up from the place and 
whizzed away above him, and he knew by 
the whistling of their wings that they had 
had a mighty scare. Followed a great 
snarling, and after the snarling a series of 
surprised and terrified yelps. They were 
the sounds that a fox might make in a trap, 
perhaps. This the polecat knew, but he 
109 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

knew, also, that there were no traps any- 
where near there. 

He approached that place through a tun- 
nel that the otters used among the reeds. 
In the middle of that tunnel he met some- 
thing in a hurry. It was swearing horribly, 
that thing, and it ran blindly into the pole- 
cat so that they rolled over together, fight- 
ing like cats. It must have been an otter. 
At least, that was the impression the pole- 
cat had, but whatever it was it scrambled to 
its feet on the instant and vanished down 
the tunnel, still stumbling dazedly, still 
swearing thickly. 

As for the polecat, he got up and con- 
tinued his path of investigation, spitting out 
fur as he went. Next moment another 
thing burst into the tunnel, yelping as it 
came, and there was no pleasure, but only a 
great and very fresh fear in the yelp. The 
polecat flattened against the wall of the tun- 
nel this time, watching the filmy green eyes 
of the thing anxiously, for he feared it was 
mad. It passed, brushing his fur all along 
one side and reeking of bad odors, and he 
110 



THE WHITE NIGHTMARE 

turned and saw by the tail of it that it was 
the fox who lodged in the same " cairn " he 
patronized. He was a hard old fox, not 
given to panic, and had not run from any- 
thing save dogs for many a year. 

It seemed to the polecat that as he reached 
the pool a white and shadowy something 
floated away over the reeds, but it made no 
sound, though it was of immense size. It 
was but a suspicion of a glimpse he had of 
it, and it did not come back. 

He found where the otter had come up 
out of the oily black water and fallen upon 
the wild duck, the couch in the reeds whence 
the fox had watched and sprung out at the 
otter, the mud on the lip of the pool, all 
plowed and splattered, where the two had 
held a fanged argument. Then— then he 
turned and went away quickly. The thing 
that had eaten the wild duck — the bunched 
feathers were evidence enough — was neither 
fox nor otter, but the unknown bird, whose 
claw-marks were all around. He under- 
stood then the conduct of the other hunters 
and knew why they were streaked with 
111 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

gashes such as might be made by many small 
stilettos. They had been so foolish as to 
argue with the white nightmare, a mistake 
on their part not likely to be repeated by 
any of them. 

The polecat removed to a hill-farm, small, 
and rude, and squat. He was in a hurry to 
feed and get back to his " cairn." Some- 
thing was wrong with the wild to-night. 
Everyone crept about with their fingers on 
their mouths, as it were, and if any crossed 
the open, they did so at the gallop, with their 
eyes on the sky. He could hear the snort- 
ing of the lean red does, concerned as to the 
welfare of their fawns, as they moved un- 
easily about the higher slopes. He could 
hear the whistling "wheu, wheu, wheu, 
wheu," of wild ducks' wings stampeding 
about the sky, and the full, wild, ringing 
alarm note of the curlews, the tocsin of the 
wild, pealed incessantly from every hill. 
Once it seemed to him that he heard the 
snorting of a horse, but when he reached the 
post there was no horse there, nor ever had 
been, but a vixen to look upon, and in place 
112 



THE WHITE NIGHTMARE 

of hoof marks, he found — Oh, murder! — 
those unspeakable claw-marks. 

Then he hurried to the fowl-house of that 
farm and got in by some miraculous con- 
triving of his own and slew a fowl quickly, 
much to the disgust of a stoat who was plan- 
ning the same coup. He fed after his 
fashion — his ruddy orbs gleaming in the 
darkness, which was full of blundering, half- 




Choked the Cry That Would Have Given Him 
Away 

awake fowls — and removed again with 
speed. At the entrance he ran up against 
something that was coming in, and it turned 
and opened its mouth to squeal, but he 
leaped at its throat and choked the cry that 
would have given him away. It was a rat. 
There was a clap like thunder as he took 
113 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

the gap in the rough yard- wall at a bound, 
and a hail of leaden shot spattered the 
lichened stone slabs behind him. That is 
the worst of fowls and pigs ; they simply will 
not die quietly, but scream till someone, or 
death, or both, arrives to stop them. Ap- 
parently the farmer had heard them and had 
fired from the bedroom window at the long, 
low shadow of the polecat as it crossed the 
yard. At least, that was the supposition, 
but the polecat did not go back to see. 

Instead, he heard the snorting of that 
horse, which wasn't a horse, again, proceed- 
ing this time from an inky black smudge of 
fir trees, and he arrived home hot and 
desperate an hour before dawn, wondering 
"how he got there. The " cairn " was de- 
serted at this hour, for its inhabitants, who 
were all beasts without the law, carried on 
business under shadow of night only. 

The polecat family's own particular den 
in the " cairn " seemed hollow and lonely, 
and, knowing that his wife would not be 
back till dawn, he lay down just within the 
mouth of the hole to wait. In times of 
114 



THE WHITE NIGHTMARE 

peace he would have slept where he lay, but 
he was ill at ease this night. 

The tocsin of the curlews still pealed 
from hill to answering hill, and the black- 
ness, now that the moon had gone, was ter- 
rifying. A gray shadow, long and low, 
grew out of the void and faded into the 
" cairn." Another shadow followed. 'Twas 
the badgers almost an hour before their 
time. Something blew past with a snort, 
and a gleam as of a dim lamp marked the 
passing of the light rump of a roe-deer. 
Behind came a second, and they were in a 
hurry, fearful and highstrung, ready to 
shoot off at a tangent at a whisper. And 
the roe is the last of the wild folk to become 
flurried. 

A suspicion of faintest gray hazed the 
east, and a rock about ten yards away grew 
into a rock instead of a crouching goblin 
which the darkness had made it. Dawn was 
at hand. And straightway there rose up out 
of the dirt the lean, slinking, raking figure 
of the fox. He had come home, like the 
badgers, long before his time, and he had 
115 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

come on his belly, and went to ground as if 
he thanked Heaven for the favor. And 
the polecat, watching with his wicked, snaky 
head erect, knew by these tokens that the 
shadow of the white nightmare— and the 
same with the claw-mark mystery — lay 
heavy upon all the wild. 

No blackcock announced dawn on the 
rock near by, as was his custom on other 
mornings. No jays shattered the silence 
with harsh, unseemly gibes. No grouse 
slung themselves in whirring showers across 
the valleys. No heron sailed up out of the 
black woods into the cauldron of the fiery 
sunrise, into which it was his wont to beat 
slowly until the glare engulfed him. All 
these things were missing this morning, and 
so was the polecat's wife and her young one. 
Only the everlasting tocsin of the curlews 
beat to and fro without pause. 

At last the polecat stood up and moved 
stiffly away into the spruce-fir wood. A 
cry, half-stifled by distance, had come to 
him on the lap of the dawn wind. It was not 
a nice cry, a thin, high chatter, but it was the 
116 



THE WHITE NIGHTMARE 

cry of a polecat for help, and it is one of the 
rules of all the weasels that that cry must 
be answered in person and at once. They are 
not, from the human point of view, desirable 
beasts, nor is there anything lovable about 
them, but they will rescue a comrade from a 
foe if they can, even if their own life pays 
forfeit — and that in itself is not half bad. 

He found the giver of that cry, and it was 
his wife. Beside her was their only and 
half -grown son. Both were carmine stained 
about the back, looking as if they had tried 
to crawl under some barbed wire, and they 
were in trouble so that they made obscene 
tooises at nothing at all. 

He was wondering in his dull animal way 
what they imagined they were fighting, 
when his eyes fell upon that which had once 
been a grouse, and beside it — was that un- 
mentionable claw-mark. That explained it 
all. The attitude of the wild folk, the tocsin 
of the curlews, the silence, the 

A shadow fell athwart the sun. His eyes 
lifted, and he was still. Above him, poised 
on vast flapping wings, which, contrary to 
117 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

the custom of all wings, made no sound, was 
a bird, and it must have been twenty-six 
inches from head to tail if it was an inch. 
It was white as the snow, that bird, cruel 
as the snow, silent as the snow, and it was 
literally muffled from big round head to 
tiger-taloned claws with layers upon layers 
of feathers. 

Then it fell, fell with the suddenness and 
force of a bolt and the polecat went down 
under it with a yell. What happened under 
that white heap, amid the terrible grappling 
claws, no one knows, for the heap choked 
suddenly and collapsed in a coughing white 
whirlwind. 

• • • • 

» " It was a snowy owl from Russia," said 
the keeper to me. " I found it lying dead 
on top of a dead polecat. The polecat's 
jaws were locked tight in the owl's throat, in 
a blind, accidental death-grip, and two other 
polecats ran away as I approached." 

Which lucid statement, you will allow, 
explained everything about the mystery, 
which in the wild had become known as 
" The White Nightmare." 
118 



THE MASTER ROGUE 



THE MASTER ROGUE 

"And he left him, grim and sulky, 
Sitting in the morning sunshine, 

Croaking fiercely his displeasure, 
Flapping his great sable pinions." 

(*' Hiawatha.") 

BUT I protest that he would have been 
completely and entirely out of place 
in any other setting. Given an eigh- 
teen hundred foot ramp, the last four hun- 
dred feet atop a sheer wall of dull gray, 
bearded with age-old moss, riven and gashed 
and furrowed by the storms of a thousand 
years; given a river— a silver snake alive- — 
crawling at bottom, fed by a dozen tiny sil- 
ver threads, spangled with bursts and puffs 
of rainbow vapors where the waterfalls 
spouted and sent up all together a confused 
murmur like unto the murmur of an ants' 
121 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 



city in a pinewood on a June day; given a 
black smudge of pine, a green slash of larch, 
a blotch of dull gold where the bracken lay, 




A Single Fang op Rock, Crowned Atop With 

Him, a Black Speck You Could See 

Miles Away 



THE MASTER ROGUE 

on the opposite slope; given a single kite 
sweeping the flank of a mile-long, dim ridge, 
half smothered in rain squalls; given a si- 
lence profound as the silence of the deep, ac- 
centuated and focused by the single strokes 
of an ax very far away, and given on the 
brow of the ridge a single fang of rock 
crowned atop with him, a black speck you 
could see miles away, motionless, austere, 
sinister — a raven. Would you have had 
him otherwise? 

Though motionless, he was concerned as 
to his mate, her nest. When in these days 
of order — and collectors — you are an out- 
law, when you are rare enough to be sought, 
and more especially, when you wear the 
black livery which is the heritage of the 
crows and the badge of robbery, pillage, and 
murder, it behooves you to " look to your 
tents." His mate would have a nest, and he 
would have her have a nest, but — there is 
many a slip 'twixt the egg and the chick, 
and well he knew it. 

No man knew the age of that raven. No 
man knows the age of any raven. All I 
123 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

know is that by any standard of age he was 
old. Yet the age stopped at the name — 
always excepting wickedness, of course. In 
all else was he young, in his prime, keen, 
alert, watchful, confident, sure and quite 
adequate- — a force to be reckoned with by 
the wild folk of the place. 

In dress he was slovenly; his wings hung, 
feathers were out of place. His beak was a 
coal-hammer, no less; his carriage the car- 
riage of the swashbuckler, and in the eye — 
the cruel, insolently humorous eye — was the 
leer of evil, not without courage, made 
manifest. 

Yes, he would nest. There was, appar- 
ently, no hurry; time for philosophic 
thought. Your wild folk, except possibly 
starlings, never hurry, by the way. All the 
same they get through more in a day than 
the average man does in a week. 

At last he rose — it was like the lifting of 
a black thought — shook out his great wings 
to the accompaniment of the stiff rustling of 
feathers, and cast himself into the void. 
The rasp as those wings bit the air told of 
124 



THE MASTER ROGUE 

power. L Yet there was nothing of the " gal- 
lery " in his flight. He flew to get there, 
and it was not till a howling maniacal gust 
of wind swept down the mountain-side upon 
him that one realized the strength of him. 
He was not concerned at all. He did not 
go tearing away like a blown leaf to wind- 
ward, as the other birds did. He was not 
obliged to back and tack. He did not find 
need to hug the ground to make headway. 
He just kept straight on without concern, 
apparently also — but this can hardly have 
been the case — without trouble. 

From time to time he did a strange thing 
— strange for so sober a flyer. He threw 
himself upon his back and allowed himself 
to fall in that position, stone wise, only to 
recover and beat forward again without 
hesitation — I had almost said without a 
smile. 

Anon he came to a horrible place. The 
cliff appeared to have been cut off with a 
giant knife, and one looked over its face, 
two hundred feet sheer, into nothing. Here, 
one thought, he will build his nest, for it was 
125 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

a safe place — for a raven's nest, I mean. 
But no. He went mad instead, or, at least 
it appeared as if he did. He must needs 
choose a tree, a bare, wind-harried affair, 
standing some half-dozen yards from the 
cliff's edge and there start his nest. The 
madness came in the fact that any good 
climber could reach it there, whereas on the" 
only other ledge, half a hundred feet down 
the cliff's face, he would have been safe from 
even the collector's agent. 

Presently something said " Cruck ! 
Cruck!" in a hollow voice that savored of 
the tomb, and his mate dropped, a black 
shadow, from the clouds. Then together 
they labored. 

That was a mad nest building, because 
the cock-bird, for all his somber mien, found 
it necessary to dance a crazy dance from 
time to time, uttering the while dolorous rav- 
ings, and to cast himself back at the cliff's 
edge and laugh hollow croaks to think that, 
by consummate recovery and skill, he 
cheated the buzzards who hung expectant to 
see him scattered on the rocks below. Then, 
126 



THE MASTER ROGUE 

as if the picture were not sufficiently arrest- 
ing, the sun must needs set behind them and, 
igniting the sky aflame, turn both birds into 
coal devils, on a coal tree, performing con- 




His Mate Dropped a Black Shadow from 
the Clouds 

tortions above a cliff of coal — all in silhouette 
against a silently raging furnace. 

The dawning found them hard at it — 
purple goblins now, against a sky of perfect 
pink, floating on blue gray and purple mists 
127 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

— for the nest-building of the raven is no 
sparrow's task. A wheel-barrow load of 
sticks alone, each stick tested separately for 
flaws, rot, and damp, comprise the outer 
works of the black one's castle, and these, 
gathered singly, often from great distance, 
are not easy to collect. 

About noon a speck — as it were an ant 
crawling up the opposite hill — appeared far 
below. Anon it stopped and was still — the 
ant had discovered a grain, perhaps. But it 
was no ant. It was a man, a collector's 
agent, which, though larger, was scarcely of 
greater worth than the ant he appeared to 
be. He was gazing through binoculars, 
prismatic binoculars to be exact, and when 
the nest came within their " field " he 
smiled. 

The great black birds needed no binoc- 
ulars to show them this scourge in detail, 
and they smiled, too. I swear they did, or 
was it a passing cloud shadow that made 
them appear to smirk, or a gull skimming 
high overhead that laughed ? 

Day after day that ant-like speck crawled 
1£8 



THE MASTER ROGUE 

aslant the opposite slope and leered a lust- 
ful leer through binoculars at the nest, and 
day after day one or other raven labored 
thereat, calling down maledictions on all col- 
lectors and their brood, and daily the nest 
grew from a notch to a bunch, from a bunch 
to a skeleton castle, and from that to a — 
landmark. And the agent grinned — he was 
very young, that agent. This was his first 
dealing with the king of the black fraternity. 
On the other hand the ravens, they were 
very old. I do not know how old, but cer- 
tainly old. Now the raven is born a child of 
the devil. With the years his cunning and 
knowledge of evil increases, and the getting 
the better of him is likely to fall neither to 
the young nor to the head-strong. No flies 
settle on your raven, if it please you. 

Thus our collector's agent forgot, or 
lacked the brains to notice, that after a 
space, one bird only of the pair took part in 
this nest building. To him the one bird was 
just a raven, but, as a matter of fact, it was 
sometimes the cock and sometimes the hen 
— and many of the sticks used to make that 
129 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

nest were rotten. They would not stand a 
gale with the weight of a full-grown hen 
raven atop for ten minutes, to say nothing 
of the brood that should come. Now, bird 
never did, nor ever will, build nest with rot- 
ten sticks. 

The British Government's "Nitro 
Proof " test for guns is no more drastic 
than the test to which birds put each single 
component part of their nursery. Still the 
human scourge grinned the vacuous grin 
of the ignorant. Certainly that nest build- 
ing was very late. Even he knew that it 
was full time for ravens to have laid all their 
eggs by now. Nevertheless he consoled 
himself with the thought that here was the 
nest and here were the birds. Barring acci- 
dents, therefore, it was almost mathematic- 
ally certain that here at the appointed time 
would be eggs also. 

On the fifth day — or it may have been the 
seventh, I forget — our raven left his nest- 
building about the hour of noon. He was 
aware, for one thing, of his good lady's rest- 
lessness and bad temper and, for another 
130 



THE MASTER ROGUE 

thing, of a voice within himself. It was a 
voice which with him, as with all birds, was 
rarely still — the voice of hunger. He would 
feed. 

Now where on earth in all that wild 
scene should a respectable old gentleman 
turn his black beak to feed? He soared 
along at a great height over the wonderful 
landscape till he came to a wood of deep, 
restful green, all a-shimmer in the sunshine 
and all astir with the restless wind that ran 
in following waves across its bosom. The 
wood was of oak, flung carpet-wise across 
the shoulder of an ample hill, and there were 
sun-washed spaces between, the trees, 
fringed with the brittle bracken, guarded by 
delicate tracery of hawthorn, bearded with 
clinging briers, and dimpled and patched 
with lawns of pure green, where deer fed 
and rabbits nibbled warily — exactly as oaks 
love to have it. 

Our raven hove to on a great bare limb 

on the edge of one of these peaceful spaces, 

quietly, unostentatiously, as if unwilling to 

break the peace of so perfect a picture. 

131 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

There was nothing at all in his manner to 
warn one of what was coming. He just 
beamed on the clearing with the complacent 
air of a benevolent old gentleman watching 
the gambols of his grandchildren. He had, 
indeed, quite a fatherly look, our raven. 

A mile away, he knew, his wife, following 
his course, had dropped to a like scene, with 
one roving eye on the world in general and 
the other turned in his direction in case he 
needed help. 

A buck — not horned now— came out into 
the naked sunlight and stared up at him for 
a moment before passing on. A thrush flew 
to the top of a hawthorn and told the world 
of his love that was assuredly born of 
melody, and a blackbird put him to shame 
with that lazy mastery of the perfect song 
which is all the blackbird's very own. A 
gay finch flaunted his gold against the sun 
on a whitethorn, and a single cock pheasant 
came out and posed for a bronze statue in 
the warm rays. 

In the shadows under the low boughs 
there were hints of dim lamps coming and 
132 



THE MASTER ROGUE 

going, which marked the passage of the 
white rumps of the elusive roe-deer, and 
once a gaunt dog-fox, tongue-lolling, eyes 
a-grin, came out to roll, but thought better 
of it and went away. Rabbits dotted the 
place everywhere ; and, as they began to for- 
get the coming of the raven, all the birds 
lifted up their voices — the mid-day hymn in 
this cathedral of a thousand pillars. 

The raven looked on and seemed almost 
to beam his kindly approval of such innocent 
delight of the wood-folk. One almost for- 
got the warning of his color as one beheld 
him at that moment, so peaceful and content 
his air. 

Suddenly was silence. It was as if a finger 
had been laid on Nature's lips, and a whisper 
sighed through the glades breathing one 
word—" Silence." But it was not silence 
the whisper said. It was " Death." A 
swift shadow shot across the clearing and all 
was, as it were, crystallized. Nothing 
moved. Nothing spoke. 

Every bird and every small beast " froze," 
while the maker of that shadow, a hawk, 
133 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 




clipper built, constructed on 
racing lines, sailed above, 
took a turn, sailed again, 
and slid on over the far 
trees. He had seen noth- 
ing because nothing had moved. Dozens 
of birds — all prey to him — really came un- 
der that sheathed glance, but they were 
" frozen," and so he saw them not. Only 
man, it seems, possesses the power of elimi- 
nating the " frozen wild folk from their 

harmonious surround- 
ings, and not every 
man at that, either. 

In a few minutes 
Nature spoke again, 
and song poured forth, 
and all went about up- 
on his or her business 
as before. 

The raven waited 

on. His air was no 
A Buck — Not Horned 

Now— Came Out into less placid, no whit less 

the Naked Sunlight j nnoce nt, than before, 
and Stared Up at , , , „ 

Him. but he was aware of an 

184 




THE MASTER ROGUE 

increasing aching void in his innards all the 
same. The ravens, however, have built up 
their success of species on the text : " He 
that belie veth shall not make haste," and 
good reason had he to believe. 

There is the patience of the cat waiting for 
a mouse, and there is the patience of the 
eagle motionless on its pinnacle, and there is 
another patience of the pike waiting, head to 
stream, at the tail of the mill-race, but the 
patience of the vulture and the raven ex- 
ceedeth all these. To the cat and the eagle 
and the pike is only the uncertainty of the 
chase, but to the vulture and the raven is the 
most certain thing of all — death. Therefore 
they wait on, they believe and do not make 
haste, knowing that in the end all things 
must come to them. They have, as it were, 
the last word. Only man has upset their 
plans. He will neither die decently in the 
open, nor let them live. You will find, how- 
ever, that wherever man does let them live, 
treating them as scavengers, they are the 
most numerous of all birds — the waiting 
game pays. 

135 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

Fifteen slow, languorous minutes dropped 
by, and during that time our raven imitated 
very passably an image carved out of the 
very jet. Then something moved. 

A rabbit came out into the clearing, and 
it was in trouble so that it could not refrain 
from giving a helpless, baby-like squeal. 
Instantly there was no living thing in the 
clearing, only the rabbit that dragged itself 
forward as one afflicted with paralysis, and 
the raven still as a pond. 

Anon came another thing. Very long, 
and very low was this thing, so that to prog- 
ress it moved in leaps, rippling over the 
grass snakily. It was brown as autumn 
leaves are brown, and its eyes shone red in 
a flat head, the shape of a wedge. The 
raven looked again and saw it was a stoat. 

The rabbit made no effort to avert the 
death that followed. It dragged and 
squealed till the stoat fell upon it and deliv- 
ered the fatal death-bite of all the weasels, 
the swift severing of the vertebrae at the 
base of the skull. 

For a few seconds after the murder the 
136 



THE MASTER ROGUE 

raven was aware of the stoat's beady eyes 
fixed upon himself. Then he was aware of 
their quick shifting to something else above, 
and at the same instant a bolt seemed to fall 
from the sky. The stoat did not so much 
go, as be gone. On a second was a stoat 
above a rabbit. The next second the rabbit 
was still there, but there was no stoat, not so 
much as a hair of his tail. Only, in his place 
stood a big buzzard, and the raven had no 
distinct recollection how on earth he got 
there, except that he must have had some 
connection with the falling of the bolt from 
the blue. 

Up to this point, as you will perceive, the 
raven had taken no part in the play. Now, 
however, he spoke — it was the voice of the 
vaulted torn!) — and announced his intention 
to claim his dues. The buzzard had its back 
turned to him at the moment, but that did 
not prevent it from yanking its head clean 
round and fixing him with its stabbing stare 
in that uncanny way peculiar to eagles and 
their allies. 

Also it replied. Now the appearance of 
137 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

the buzzard is regal. One might almost 
mistake the bird for an eagle — when the 
eagle was not by. Therefore, when it 
replied in a thin, peevish mew that would 
have disgraced a three weeks' old kitten, one 
felt surprise. But the raven took no notice. 
He went down to the rabbit like a knight 
charging, beak held straight out as a lance 
in rest. And the buzzard — remembered an 
appointment. It had apparently no more 
heart than the rabbit it would eat. Came 
later — the single croak must have called her 
— the raven's mate, and the two dined in 
their own peculiar way, which is not our 
way by any means. 

It was an hour after that, when the after- 
noon had set in wet and squally, that we find 
them flying low over the shoulder of a grim; 
naked hill not a quarter of a mile from their 
nest. But they were not going to their nest. 
They went, instead, to a ghastly place. It 
was as if a titanic shell had burst on the 
crest of the hill, rending and tearing out a 
gash two hundred feet deep. 

The walls sloped outward, bulged hor- 
138 



THE MASTER ROGUE 

ribly; the bottom was filled as to half its 
area by a bottomless pool — at least, the folk 
of those parts said it was bottomless — and it 
was tenanted entirely by a wind that sighed 
and sighed forever through a rift in the 
ramp of its sides, and by nothing else at all. 
There were, however, bones at the bottom 
among the strewn rocks on one side, so 
death, if not life, visited there. And the 
Gorge of Death called they this place of 
horror. 

The ravens shot over the giddy edge of 
the cliff, slid like black meteors down the 
sickening drop, and vanished over the bulge 
before spoken of, exactly over the spot 
where the bones — they were the bones of 
lambs — lay one hundred feet beneath. And 
they did not return. Night came on, and 
they failed to show. 

If, however, any had been out at that 
stark hour when night pales to day one 
might have seen the cock raven beating 
heavily overland to this spot, and he bore a 
burden, the leg of a lamb. No, he did not 
kill the lamb. He found it dead. I don't 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

know how he came by the leg, though, with- 
out the rest. 

For once he hurried, and literally toppled 
over that awful cliff, swept out in a hissing 
curve, and vanished down under. 

Now it was that morning that the collec- 
tor's agent chose to rob the raven's nest. It 
had been completed some little while now, 
and he rarely came to the spot to watch 
without finding one or other bird about the 
place. He concluded there were eggs. 
You picture him, toiling up the slope from 
the valley below, growing from an ant to a 
fly, and from a fly to a beetle, and from a 
beetle to an irregular smudge half sub- 
merged in heather. 

All the world knew he was coming ; those 
on the crest of the hill a mile above him were 
aware of his progress without looking. 
Any could say, pointing, with shut eyes: — 
" He is here. He is there. Now he is by 
the old peat pool. Now he crosses the 
stream." Indeed, who could not know? 
Were there not a dozen voices shouting it 
out to the tops of the immemorial hills? 
140 



THE MASTER ROGUE 

Now it was the curlew — the spirit of the 
waste — weaving space mazes and yelling 
lost yells ; now it was a buzzard, a wheeling 
speck in the infinite, whispering " See-uu! 




^w 



Now It Was the Curlew — the Spirit of the 

Waste — Weaving Space Mazes and Yelling 

Lost Yells 

See-uu! " Anon it would be a cock grouse, 

important and querulous, or a blue hare 

141 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

making a living streak of itself up to and 
over the brow, saying nothing at all, but 
speaking much in action, or possibly a 
golden plover, shocked and excitable, dash- 
ing about the sky, whistling mournfully. 
All spoke the same words, though in many 
languages : — " He comes. Man comes. 
To cover! To cover." 

A red fox, the last of the night hunters 
to go to lair, paused a moment to watch with 
sharp, cunning eyes the incarnation of his 
hatred stumbling two rifle shots below him ; 
a restless stag detached himself from his sur- 
rounding and removed over the hill crest 
with cynical displeasure, and a bustling 
blackcock — goodness and its lyre-tailed self 
know what it was doing there — got up with 
a shocking commotion and hurtled down into 
the valley bullet-wise. 

The hen raven peered over the edge of the 
nest, cocked her head on one side, eyed the 
marauder with her one unforgettable eye — 
she had lost the other over the matter of a 
slight miscalculation of gun-shot range — 
and made a remark. The cock — he was 

in 



THE MASTER ROGUE 

sitting on a honey-colored cairn of boulders 
— replied in suitable obscene criticism of the 
man thing, and — I like to think of his doing 
this because it was so human in the light of 
after events and proved him the born actor 
that he was — danced an unholy dance of 
rage. He lifted his wings, and with them 
half open above his back, executed — always 
looking at his toes — a sort of crazy High- 
land " fling." 

Meanwhile the man climbed slowly, one 
eye on the nest, the other on the ground, till 
at last he was within eighty yards of the tree. 
Came then a rush as the hen raven bundled 
herself bodily up from the nest, and her 
mate joining her you could hear the stiff 
rustle of their shadowing wings at that dis- 
tance — hurled aloft, to swoop and croak 
awful things. 

Presently they fetched up on a rock a 
couple of hundred yards off and watched 
the man fix his rope and put on his climbing- 
irons beneath the tree. He was sure of his 
eggs now. Had he not beheld the hen-bird 
sit tight till the very last moment? 
143 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

They watched, and our raven was mag- 
nificent throughout. He became rage made 
manifest. He tore up grass with his beak ; 
he danced as on hot plates ; he swooped at a 
crew of vulgar-mouthed jackdaws and all 
but slew one of the luckless footpads that 
he cut off from the flock ; he soared up to the 
ultimate dim clouds because the shadow of a 
kestrel crossed his path, and the little falcon, 
thinking to mock him with her more ex- 
quisite wing-power, played about him as a 
terrier does a cow, till in an unguarded mo- 
ment she came too near and failed to clear 
his streaking rush. She fell in consequence 
to earth. The fall had killed her, but it was 
not the fall that had all but cut her head 
from her shoulders. 

The climbing of that tree was a slow and 
painful job. It was rotten as a toadstool 
in October. (Did you ever known a raven 
build on a rotten tree, or rook on a rotten 
elm? No, nor I). The collector's agent 
should have known too, but he kept on. 
Times he swore as branch after branch 
snapped like a pistol shot under his grasp, 
1U 



THE MASTER ROGUE 

and times he panted too hard to swear, by 
reason of the effort. Yet he never guessed. 

At last he could put his hand over the 
edge of the nest — he was breathing hard 
now and grinning a triumphant grin — 
could, with another hoist and an extra 
wriggle, feel within the tips of his 
fingers, and 

At that moment the collector's agent be- 
came aware of a sudden stillness. Not a 
thing stirred. The ravens were silent. No 
creature spoke on earth or in sky. His 
heart seemed to stand still. The smile was 
still on his face, parodied. He gave a 
mighty heave. A beetle in the nest might 
have seen his face as it peered over, set in a 
sickly grin. But the beetle was busy dodg- 
ing the clutching fingers, and vanished. 
The vacuous face of the grin remained, star- 
ing, staring, staring — the nest was empty. 
It had, as a matter of fact, never been any- 
thing else. And the ravens were gone. The 
collector's agent discovered that when he 
looked round. They had disappeared, 
probably when he first noticed the sudden 
145 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

silence, and he — was done — duped — had — 
fooled — bluffed. 

The nest was a dummy, and he had 
wasted his time watching it for the major 
part of a month. Then that collector's 
agent descended from that tree as swiftly as 
might be, and upon the ground below he, in 
turn, danced his dance. Mad as the raven's 
dance was his, a grotesque and weird series 
of contortions, and as he danced, his 
clenched fists were raised above his head, 
even as the raven's wings had been, and he 
cursed those ravens by all the powers of 
darkness and by the devil, their master, and 
by a hundred and one other things as well. 

But the ravens did not care — not they. 
They were sitting just under the bulging, 
unclimbable, leaning ramp of the side of the 
Gorge of Death a quarter of a mile away. 
On the edge of their nest sat they, a huge 
nest, strong and well made, tucked snugly 
into a perfect ledge, anchored on century- 
old ivy and strengthened by years of per- 
fecting here and there, there and here. No 
man could reach them here. Above was the 
146 



THE MASTER ROGUE 

bulging cliff, like a giant's breast, and be- 
low — a sheer hundred feet drop to the sur- 
face of the bottomless pool, and Heaven 
alone knows how many feet drop below that. 
They did not care. Why should they? 
They were contemplating fondly as fine a 
brood of three healthy, lusty young ravens 
as ever opened their beaks to the rising sun 
for food on a spring morning. The last had 
only been hatched that day, but in due time 




Saw Five Great Black Ravens Beating Over the 
Sublime Grim, Blunt Shoulders of the Hills 

the last flew. And in the autumn, when the 
winds howled, bringing the Arctic wildfowl 
down in strings across a ragged sky, shep- 
herds, going to their work of a morning, saw 
five great black ravens beating over the sub- 
lime, grim, blunt shoulders of the hills and 
they would nod and grunt to themselves 
something about: 

U7 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

" I'm thinking the oold 'un's mighty fly. 
They've reared another muekle broodie of 
bairns there against the world an' a'." 

And the buzzards whom the collector's 
agent had looted of their eggs before he de- 
parted weaved mazes in and out among the 
tattered reek of the clouds, mewing weak- 
hearted protests at the great black birds and 
wondering how they had done the trick. 
But the ravens said no word. They raided, 
and they risked, and despoiled, and pillaged, 
and pirated after the immemorial custom 
of ravens all the world over, and they never 
told anybody their secret. 

Only the ring-ouzel— he who had nested 
by the bottomless pool, under the very rob- 
ber's stronghold— knew, and he told me, 
what time an October gale flung him ex- 
hausted at midnight on my window-sill some 
hundreds of miles south of the raven's home. 
I took him in and, as he sat on the hearth- 
rug, his jet form a smeared patch on the 
red stuff, turned to ruby and all manner of 
" shot " colors beneath the blaze — alter- 
nately sipping whisky and milk from a 
148 



THE MASTER ROGUE 

spoon and stretching his chilled wings to the 
blaze, while I dozed in the arm-chair, lulled 
by the howling storm, he told the tale to me 
as the price of his life. 

At least, I like to think he did — and yet— 
and yet! What would you? The hot 
room, the cold night, the storm without, the 
hour, the stillness above the storm— perhaps 
I dozed and it was a dream after all. Who 
knows ? The ring-ouzel does, but he is thou- 
sands of miles away now in tropical Africa, 
or wherever it is ring-ouzels are pleased to 
winter. And probably I shall never see him 
again. And he — he will never be able to 
prove the truth of what I have said. 



149 



THE SAINT 



THE SAINT 

" Be as one who knoweth and yet holdeth his tongue." 

BARTLET swears he had nothing to 
do with it, and Macgregor says noth- 
ing at all, and Brown, the animal 
tamer of Benchell's Menagerie, whistles 
when you ask him about it. Nevertheless, 
as Blatant Hardway, Esq., pointed out, the 
facts looked very fishy, very fishy indeed. 

The facts of the case are odd — Benchell's 
Menagerie went to the town of Aberdath by 
road. In his cage in the last van of the 
procession was " the Saint." Somewhere, 
as near as might be, at the point where the 
road to Aberdath runs for two miles through 
the demi semi strictly preserved moor and 
forest known as Glenskye, the property of 
Blatant Hardway, Esq. (acquired by mort- 
gage, by the way), the Saint escaped, got 
out of his cage and ran away into the gath- 
153 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

ering night, and no one knew anything 
about it till after the arrival at Aberdath, 
when Brown, red in the face and perspiring, 
ran to Benchell with the broken lock of the 
Saint's cage in his hands and winged words 
in his mouth. It was evident that the jolt- 
ing of the cart — it was a vile road — or the 
teeth of the Saint, or both, had broken the 
lock. 

"But where?" roared Benchell. "It's 
not the 'ow of it, Brown, it's the where." 

" God knows," said Brown. " An' some- 
body else will before mornin', if I knows the 
Saint." 

Then a vision of the Saint careering across 
Scotland on his own seemed to strike both 
men together. Benchell put his hand over 
his mouth and went away, and Brown put 
his hand over his mouth and his handkerchief 
in it and went the other way. 

There was no attempt made to recapture 
the Saint. He was entered in the books of 
the menagerie as " Sold." Nor was anyone 
living enlightened further on the matter 
either then or thereafter. 
154 



THE SAINT 



Now, Hardway's Glenskye marched with 
Bartlet's Glenask moor, and the two were 
rivals for the record game bag for all north- 
ern Scotland, and Smythe, Hardway's head- 
keeper, had that season by means which are 
said to have been crooked enticed the bulk 
of Bartlet's birds over the border with the 
result that Glenskye beat its own record 
bag, and Glenask was nowhere. Naturally 
Macgregor, who was Bartlet's head-keeper, 
had sworn vengeance. 

These things happened before the loom- 
ing of Benchell and his menagerie upon the 
horizon. Now, where Hardway makes his 
point is this: his man, Smythe, had seen 
Macgregor and Brown in deep conversation 
in the private, or back, parlor of an obscure 
local " pub " shortly before closing time, and 
Macgregor was plying Brown with many 
and wonderful drinks, drinks quite beyond 
Mac's power to pay for. That was at 10 :30 
p. m. and at 4 : 00 P. m.,, or as near as may be, 
on the following evening the Saint escaped. 

So far all seems clear. What followed 
was not so clear, for obvious reasons. 
155 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

Smythe certainly knows spots and dashes of 
it, as it were. The whole real story, how- 
ever, is locked up in the secret history of the 
wild, whence, because of one or two services 
rendered to wild folk, I got it — it came to 
me, you understand. The merlin, smallest 
of falcons, he told me some of it what time 
I warned him of danger; the "father of 
cunning," the old gray fox, added more 
when I freed him one day from a trap ; and 
" wise one," the long-eared owl, rilled in 
what the others had left out when I lay ob- 
serving nature in a pine-wood during the 
long, scented stillness of a moonlit night. 

You picture the Saint putting all the 
yards between himself and Benchell and all 
his works that was possible. Anyone not 
knowing him might have mistaken him for a 
" Teddy bear " with a much worn disreput- 
able mop of a tail added. Tail and head 
pointed at the ground ; the back arched like 
the back of pussy when she spots a dog ; the 
feet were set down flat like hands, or bears' 
feet ; there was a glint of longish white claws, 
and they rattled on stones ; the coat of rusty 
156 



THE SAINT 



brown-black looked as if it were being shed, 
only that was its permanent state; the gait 
of him was his own, none other shared it, it 
was an out-at-heels, disreputable, part gal- 
lop, part trot, part anything you please, 
and the whole appearance of him was of the 
shades shady. This one saw as he removed. 

Then, after a certain time, he stopped and 
looked round; and one saw his face, 

and ! It was not a face of this earth at 

all. It was the face of a nightmare, a very 
bad nightmare, the visage of a strayed fiend 
who never ought to have been allowed above 
ground at all, even by night. Black it was 
and with a dog-like snout; lips raised in an 
evil leer just enough to hint at the steely 
fangs beneath ; a low, brutal brow, and eyes, 
as of tiny coals smouldering, in which lurked 
all the hate of all the wild- folk against man 
concentrated into one brain, and something 
else, not hate, but a knowledge and cunning 
which it is not right for any beast to possess. 

To be quite exact, he was a wolverene, or 
glutton from Russia, a beast of the weasel 
tribe, though not in the least like a weasel, 
157 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

being in size and in looks half-way between 
a bear and a badger. Thus the Saint as he 
appeared on the surface. Comes now that 
part of him which lay beneath the surface. 

He stopped, he looked round, he 
scratched, and then with a growl at nothing 
in particular — or it may have been some 
memory of Brown — he hurried on. The 
flame of the setting sun smouldered and 
went out; a pale moon peeped wonderingly 
over a rocky ridge ; the bats wove delicate 
mazy patterns against the white moon's 
face ; the last grouse had ceased to crow, the 
last blackcock had gone back to the frown- 
ing woods ; a stag roared suddenly, bursting, 
as it were, the heavy silences of the place, 
and another farther up the mountain-side 
answered, coughing hoarsely, and although 
the first stag was himself hidden behind a 
clump of heather, you could see the f unneled 
steam of his breath shoot out from the cover 
as he roared. 

After a time the Saint came to a pool and 
stopped short. It was not the almost 
sacred beauty of the place that held him ; not 
158 



THE SAINT 



the frosted silver pool set deep in purple 
ramparts; not the sight of the old gray 
mountain-fox, a beautifully moulded form 
thrown in silhouette against the frosted 
silver; nor the roebuck which stood at gaze 
on a rock higher up so that just his antlered 
head was ringed by the moon — mounted, as 
it were, against the moon. None of these 
things gave him pause. The scent of grouse 
asleep held him rigid, a family of grouse, 
full-feathered and ready for shooting. 

Then the Saint moved from place to place 
very quickly, and there were horrible sounds 
as of flutterings and bird cries of " Mur- 
der!" Marvelously quick were the move- 
ments of the Saint for so clumsy looking a 
beast — a bound here, a slash there, a crunch 
somewhere else, and then silence. The 
grouse had gone, all but four. Those four 
remained, blasted from life almost before 
they knew it. 

The fox, after the first bound of alarm, 

turned and viewed the thicket whence came 

the sounds of murder by night. Vermin 

were scarce on Glenskye by reason of many 

159 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 



traps. He came to the conclusion, there- 
fore, that this must be the work of a polecat 
that had wandered down from the moun- 
tains. He would investigate. Who cared 
for a polecat? — besides one might bully 
him out of his own " kill." 

You know the rules of the stalk as laid 
down in fox-lore ; how you must crawl belly- 
flat, how you must place each foot down 
separately and without noise, and how you 
must use every stone, every bush, every 
blade of grass ever to screen you? Well, 
the old gray fox did all this, and yet, when 
with infinite caution he had got to cover, he 
— fell backwards and went away in a hurry. 
He found the Saint open-mouthed and ter- 
rible in a setting of corpses and feathers. 
The Saint was quite ready for him, was ex- 
pecting him, had, in fact, been cognizant of 
the stalk from the very first. No wonder 
the fox went away. It is not every day one 
comes across beasts that can foresee the 
stalk of foxes. 

The Saint fed the first good feed he had 
tasted since Fate in the shape of a trap had 
160 



THE SAINT 



taken him from his native wilds of Russia 
half a year ago. Then he drank, cleaned 
from head to heel — even he could not dis- 
obey this the strictest of nature's laws — and 
ambled off, A dozen pairs of furtive eyes 
watched him go, a dozen alert moist muzzles 
came and sniffed inquiringly at his tracks 
after his passing, for in the wild there are 
always those that watch and are never seen. 
But the Saint, what did he care? Few he 
knew could face him in open combat, and in 
cunning none at all. 

He moved slightly uphill, our wolverene, 
to the roughest places, the most ghostly 
gorges, the most bristly thickets, the black- 
est pines, the most frowning cliffs, the 
angriest streams that leaped half their 
course in clean drops, and galloped the rest. 
He prowled here by instinct I suppose, for 
he could not have known that here alone he 
would have a fair working chance to sur- 
vive in the days to come, nor that this was 
the wildest spot on all the moors in that 
whole country. 

He was now in the heart of the most 
161 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

strictly preserved estate in Scotland. Only 
a stray stag was shot here occasionally, for 
the grouse was king, the blackcock his Heir 
Apparent, the capercailzie his Prime Minis- 
ter, the pheasant Governor of the Lower 
Levels, and the gay mallard and gayer teal 
Pages in Waiting. There were, also, rab- 
bits. Vermin here were scarcer than straw- 
berries in winter. There were, as we have 
seen, a few patriarchs at the game, but the 
great majority found many inducements to 
stay away, The Saint discovered one of 
these inducements as he shambled his own 
particular shamble through the glens. 
Then the trouble began. 

Suddenly, without any reason that you 
could see, the Saint's fur sat up all along 
his back, and he sat down on his ragged tail. 
His snout pointed straight at the ground 
like an accusing finger, and there was a 
look in his eyes that was distinctly danger- 
ous. To the human eye he appeared to be 
snatching at gnats. Nothing in the way of 
danger could lie along the soft carpet of 
moss that formed his path. So said his eyes 
162 



THE SAINT 



also, but his nose told another story. His 
nose spelt out the ominous word " steel." 

Presently you see him walking in in- 
finitely cautious circles round this spot. 
Then, having marked the danger point, he 
started to dig swiftly and angrily. He dug 




He Carried It Two Hundred Yards Away and 

Hid It Past All Hope of Finding in the 

Bowels of a Hollow Tree 

with the air of one not altogether new to this 
game, and at the end of the dig was a chain, 
and at the end of the chain was a steel trap, 
jaws set ready for work, and the whole con- 
trivance was most artfully concealed be- 
neath the innocent carpet of moss. 
168 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

Then was seen in what manner the Saint 
differed from all other beasts. The drag- 
ging of the trap out of its hiding place 
by the chain had sprung it and the cruel 
metallic snap of its jaws was the signal for 
a kind of madness on the part of the Saint. 
He became in appearance more fiendish 
than ever, and he gave himself up to vent- 
ing fury upon that trap in a human and 
ghastly manner. Then he carried it two 
hundred yards away and hid it past all hope 
of finding in the bowels of a hollow tree 
— hid it, I said, he who was only an 
animal. 

" God knows, and someone else will by 
morning, if I know the Saint," Brown had 
said, and that showed that the animal tamer 
was at least a man of discernment. Deeper 
and deeper the wolverene slouched into the 
heart of the preserve, and his progress was 
one of marvelous actions. Carefully fol- 
lowing the track of the keeper who had set 
the first trap, he unearthed others — good- 
ness and his extraordinary self knew how he 
discovered them — to the number of twelve. 
164 



THE SAINT 



Each of these he pulled up, " threw," 
carried off, and hid. In the case of one 
trap, he found a miserable stoat therein. 
Him he killed and partly consumed, leaving 
the remainder of the carcass as an insolent 
reminder to any whom it might concern that 
he, the Saint, had passed that way. 

Thence he passed — always ascending 
slowly, through ranked and serried larch, or 
black cathedrals of stately pine — to the 
level of the upper moors. This was the big 
beat, the grand beat, the place where 
Blatant Hardway, Esq., and his friends 
shooting from butts, were wont to make 
their record one day's bag for all northern 
Scotland. 

You will understand that in Russia one 
eats, as one lives, under more than one re- 
striction — and the wolverene had come, not 
willingly, from Russia. Famine to him was 
something more than a name merely. He 
had met famine face to face. So had all his 
fellow wild-folk of those parts, and that 
made them both scarce and wary. If he 
wanted a meal, and he was of that tribe who 
165 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

live under a curse of eternally wanting 
meals, he had to work for it. 

Therefore, when he issued out upon the 
high moor — a long, squat, menacing shape 
stealing in the shadows that lay beneath the 
crests of the waves of that purple sea of 
heather — and found grouse in hundreds he 
— well, he lost his head I suppose. You 
know the feeling that comes over a school- 
boy who finds himself let loose in a pastry- 
shop, or of a man who after years of poverty 
finds himself suddenly wealthy? Some- 
thing of that feeling must have assailed the 
Saint at the sight of a hunting-ground the 
fatness of which was beyond his wildest 
ideas. 

» There is no official return to show the ex- 
tent of the damage done by that one beast 
on the high moor in that single night be- 
tween midnight and an hour before dawn. 
That he gorged to repletion and continued 
slaying after gorging simply for the love 
of the thing is evident. Not that the wol- 
verene is exactly an agile beast, as agil- 
ity is counted in the wild, but the grouse 
166 



THE SAINT 



were so pampered, so fat, so spoiled by the 
fostering of man that it was mere child's 
work for a hardened hunter like himself to 
slay and slay and go on slaying till morn- 
ing. The fox speaks of a vision of him red- 
eyed, red-fanged, threatening, gliding and 
darting with unexpected swiftness among 
the twisted heather stems; the long-eared 
owl tells of how he alone counted ten grouse 
lying dead and uneaten in the path of the 
Saint, and the merlin has it that he beheld 
the keeper next dawn pick up five more, 
and goodness knows how many more were 
overlooked. 

But though mad for the time being, the 
Saint was no fool. An hour before dawn 
found no Saint, or rather it found him at 
the bottom of an ail-but impassable gorge, at 
the end of a ten-foot cleft of rock two feet 
above a perfectly insane waterfall with a 
fifty-foot drop, and a pool of, for all I know, 
more than fifty foot depth below. The 
hanging rainbow vapor of the fall hid the 
cleft entirely, the gnarled roots of a single 
towering Scotch fir had rent him an obscure 
167 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

back passage in case his exit in front were 
cut off, and in order that any pursuer should 
not find all this too easy, it was necessary to 
make at least four, and possibly five, giddy 
leaps from rock to rock above the maniacal 
waters to get to the cleft. 

All that day the Saint slept, lulled by the 
roar of the fall and the ceaseless chatter of 
moving waters, while sapphire dragon-flies 
with ruby eyes passed and passed again 
above him ; the dainty white- fronted dippers 
played in and out all round him, and an oc- 
casional sullen echoing splash told where 
some monster steel-blue salmon, wide-gilled, 
hook- jawed, firm-sided, fresh run from the 
sea, was attempting the passage of the falls. 
From time to time a flock of grouse burst 
with a whirr of wings overhead to drop out 
of sight over the opposite wall of honey- 
colored rock. Once it was no grouse, but a 
raking form that went by, flying with that 
slashing winnow that is the mark of the 
peregrine falcon all the world over; once 
too a single snipe came and — for reasons 
alone known to itself — hovered exactly 
168 



THE SAINT 



above the fall 
calling, calling, 
and once with a 
mighty rush of wings 
and a huge flurry and 
commotion a great cock- 
capercailzie went sailing 
majestically by. 

A Raking Form Went By, 
Flying With That Slashing 
Winnow That Is the Mark 
op the Peregrine Falcon All 
the World Over. 

From the fall 
ness for upwards 
hour the bats 
they wheeled and 
swerved caught 
sight of the 
steady glare 
of two eyes at 
the edge of 
the cleft. 
That was all 
— j us t the 
eyes unmov- 




PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

ing, inscrutable, and indescribably malig- 
nant. That was the Saint taking his bear- 
ings. He was no fool. He knew that his 
was no life to expose recklessly and that such 
as he are not allowed to make even one mis- 
take. Hence this motionless sitting just 
within the cleft, this frigid watching, this 
keen listening, this testing and analysing 
of every scent riding on the air currents. 
Had a man moved, had a man drawn a loud 
breath even the Saint would have known it. 
Then a cloud slid across the moon, and as 
its shadow passed across the cleft and on, 
something, it seemed, just the least sus- 
picion of a deeper shadow, passed with it — 
or was it imagination? Any way, when the 
cloud shadow had gone — and that was in al- 
most the same time as a man would take to 
hold a deep breath — there was no longer the 
steady glow of those burning coals within 
the cleft. There was nothing at all, the 
place was empty, and the Saint was sham- 
bling downhill through dense cover a hun- 
dred yards away. I do not pretend to 
know how he got there; one moment in his 
170 



THE SAINT 



den, the next drifting, drifting, a shadow 
among a dozen shadows, in and out over 
the mottled floor of moss, between the 
crawling stems of age-old heather — down- 
hill to the still and stately gloom of the 
woods. 

Once within the cathedral silence of the 
columned aisles the beast paused. There 
was a fine smell of pines in the air and pine 
needles crunched underfoot. Far above 
him the wind was singing a romping song to 
itself among the tops of the trees. It 
sounded like the far-away dirge of surf 
trampling on a sandy shore. There was 
no other sound. 

Suddenly dim stars floated in the spaces 
between the grained boles; twin lights 
swung from trunk to trunk. There was a 
whisper as of fairy feet flitting. One could, 
in that hour and setting, have believed any- 
thing, believed even that he had surprised 
the fairies of the place at their gambols. 
But they were no fairies. The moonlight 
said so. Twenty yards away it was pleased 
to weave a patch of silver tracery shining 
171 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

through the branched roof, and a brown 
form trotted — trotted I say, drifted light as 
a wisp of smoke across it. 

Instantly without one second's pause, the 
Saint had projected himself, swift as a bolt, 
across the intervening space, but he was met 
by a tearing blow on the face, and the beast 
that he had sprung at was not there. It 
was — it had been — a roebuck. None but 
the roe could have executed that stealthy 
flitting and that perfect rebuff and evasion. 
Of all the deer none could have acted with 
such agility and — this was the miracle — 
such coolness. 

Then it was that our wolverene revealed 
his true colors, and one saw that men had 
not christened him the Saint for nothing. 
With blood streaming down his diabolical 
face, he raged and tore like a thing pos- 
sessed of a devil. He growled, he gibbered, 
he snarled, he rolled, he tore up the earth 
with his long white claws, he ran round in 
circles, he bit up dead branches, and finally 
he set off at a canter upon a tour of destruc- 
tion that was to live in the memory of the 
keepers of Glenskye. 

172 



THE SAINT 



It is on record that on that short night he 
discovered, " threw," wrenched up, and hid 
no less than sixteen traps which had been 
set for vermin; killed in sheer wanton lust 
of slaughter not less than three rabbits, six 
grouse, and in the lower woods, four low- 
roosting pheasants, and finally ended by 




A Collie Started in to Rout the Pillager, But 
He Was Himself Routed 

pursuing a hare into a sheep-fold and then 
terrifying those woolly ones to such an ex- 
tent that they broke away and fled not less 
than four miles across the moors. He must 
have attacked the sheep too, for more than 
one bore ugly wounds on the flank, such 
wounds as his steely jaws alone could in- 
173 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

flict — though it was put down to the account 
of poachers' dogs, as the traps which van- 
ished were put down to the door of poachers. 
A shepherd's dog, a collie, discovered him at 
this gentle pastime at two in the morning, 
and started in to rout the pillager, but he 
was himself routed and returned to his mas- 
ter at 2:08 a. m. a ghastly and wrecked 
horror. 

The day that followed found the Saint 
hidden in his nearly impregnable lair. He 
slept the sleep of the wild folk, which is at 
the same time the deepest and lightest of 
sleep. Rain storms chased one another 
across the face of the moor, black clouds 
piled up and toppled and tore, and men 
prowled all whither. They were keepers — 
four men with worried-looking faces, for 
which fact there was no wonder. Smythe 
was in a state bordering upon insanity. 
His moors were being ruined, his woods 
were being spoilt, and worst of all his high 
moor, his daisy, his shoot of shoots was, so 
far as the grouse were concerned, going to 
the dogs. 

174 



THE SAINT 



Nor was that all ; the absence of traps was 
giving the vermin a chance, there were al- 
ready signs of an increase of the banned 
ones. Finally, as if this were not enough, 
that old ruffian Macgregor would button- 
hole him when and wherever it happened to 
be most inconvenient— in front of Blatant 
Hardway for choice- — and complain of the 
fact that the vermin from Glenskye were 
spreading all over his moors. 

" Can ye no trap, mon? Can ye no 
trap ? It's awf u\ Yon high moor o' yours 
is just crawlin' varmin," cried old Mac, and 
Smythe choked. 

Hardway cursed Smythe, and Smythe 
cursed the keepers, and the keepers having 
nobody to curse, patrolled them with loaded 
guns, by night as well as day, it being 
thought that poachers stole the traps and 
their dogs did the rest of the damage. It 
was even suspected that old Mac had these 
poachers in pay, for it was an open secret 
among the men that Smythe had, by laying 
trails of dainty foods and oils, and by pay- 
ing shepherds to let their dogs run free on 
175 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

Glenask and keep them " at heel " on Glen- 
skye, ruined the shooting on the former to 
the glory of the latter in the previous 
season. 

The burning orbs of the Saint saw these 
men pass and repass, their forms silhouetted 
against the sky-line when the moon got up 
over the hills that night, and he trebled his 
caution accordingly. It was fully an hour 
and a half after dark when he sallied upon 
his raid that night. As before, he was out 
and away long before the keenest watcher 
could have realised it. He trailed the 
patrols, watched them from the heart of the 
thickets, drew circles round them and 
examined them from every point of view. 

Finally, he lured one of their dogs on his 
trail till, a quarter of a mile away from any 
help, he turned and rent the unfortunate 
one and sent it howling to its master, a dog 
carved scientifically past all recognition. 
Moreover, as if that did not satisfy, he un- 
earthed the keepers' suppers hidden in a 
hollow tree, scattered them broadcast, and 
hid what he could not scatter — aye, even to 
176 



THE SAINT 



the flask of " th' wee drappie " hid he the 
things. Then he retired to the serried larch- 
woods and dined serenely off blackcock, 
picking, mind you, only the daintiest por- 
tion of each bird, as the disunited corpses 
next day attested. 

Any stranger who had visited Glenskye 
in the days that followed that night would 
have declared the land to be in a state of 
war. There was no peace in the place at all, 
though there was silence ; that silence which 
discovers waiting men armed with loaded 
guns behind thickets, that silence which 
comes from the knowledge of being con- 
tinually under observation of at least one 
pair of binoculars had Glenskye. And by 
night there were ceaseless patrols also. In 
those days it was certain death for any dog 
not holding an official position to be found 
upon the shooting estate of friend Hard- 
way, and little better for a strange man. 
Nevertheless, the position became in no wise 
less strained at all. In fact, it was evident 
from the clouded brow of Hardway and the 
fierce desperation written upon the face of 
177 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

Smythe that something very terrible would 
happen soon. It must. There was no hope 
for it. 

Meanwhile nobody — and there were, with 
local police, not more than thirty watchers 
armed variously, to say nothing of dogs of 
terrible and murderous aspect — did any- 
thing; nobody saw anything; nobody heard 
anything. It was as if the land were under 
a spell, as if the spirits of all the poachers 
that had ever in days past visited Glenskye 
had chosen that time to rise from their graves 
and visit it again. Traps continued to 
saunter apparently into spookland; coveys 
of grouse which to-day were a wondrous 
fine sight in the face of the sun, were to- 
morrow a scattered and panic-stricken 
remnant fleeing blindly from the death in 
the night that they could not see; pheasants 
which roosted carelessly low one night 
roosted in the other world the next, and even 
the great, pompous capercailzie cocks, the 
pride and glory of Glenskye, appeared to 
be slowly dissolving like vapor into the 
deadly nights. 

178 



THE SAINT 



Nor was that all ; a keeper left his gun in 
a locked hut on the high moor at sundown 
and by sunrise it had gone, walked into the 
darkness and no more returned, and half-a- 
dozen other things, game-bags, sticks, traps, 
and little things of that sort, had gone with 
it. Here, however, there was something to 
go upon. A Thing had broken in at the 
back of the hut and this, unless it had been 
a dog or a badger, must certainly have been 
a boy. No man could have crawled through 
that hole. Then it is on record that Smythe 
went temporarily but completely mad, and 
old Mac ceased suddenly from sauntering 
up and down the boundary, mocking the 
while in a loud voice, because Smythe had 
run after him with a loaded gun and an un- 
der-keeper hanging desperately round his 
waist. 

From this you will perceive that not at 
this time, and possibly at no time, was the 
presence of the Saint suspected, or even 
hinted at. Probably not a man there knew 
that such a beast existed in any part of the 
world, let alone here in the grouse's holy of 
179 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

holies. It was always the same theme, the 
same quest, poachers must do the stealing 
and their dogs the killing, and thus, partly 
because of his unparalleled caution, partly 
because of his marked nocturnal habits, his 
immense fighting powers, and above all his 
uncanny — I had almost said human — 
knowledge and cunning, the Saint might for 
all I know have continued filibustering at 
Glenskye to this day had he been content. 
Unfortunately, however, as happened to 
Alexander, he sighed for other worlds to 
conquer. He had done every conceivable 
sort of harm that he could do to Glenskye, 
had " knocked the stuffing out of the place " 
in fact, and was now prompted — possibly 
by the devil his master — to extend his sphere 
of influence. 

Then calamity descended upon him. 

It was on the seventeenth night after his 
escape, a night of tearing wind, racing 
clouds, bursts and spatters of rain, and vel- 
vet blackness, that the Saint evacuated the 
cleft and removed, at his indescribable 
slouch, away, away, over the hills. Some- 
180 



THE SAINT 



thing of that restless nomad spirit which 
afflicts all the weasel tribe must have come 
upon him in that hour, I think. For a mo- 
ment he paused on the edge of the heather 
and hesitated. He shook himself with a 
swirl of flying wet and sniffed the hammer- 
ing gale. Whither? He had all the com- 
pass to choose from. But fate had turned 
her face from him at last. He shambled off 
westward, and westward lay Glenask and, 
what was the main point, old Macgregor— 
but how was he to know that? 

Once, on his way, he heard men whisper- 
ing and knew by the taint in the air that they 
were not ten yards off; these were keepers 
lying in wait for him, had they known it, 
but they never knew. Once, too, he " froze " 
at the vibration of footsteps — man's as- 
suredly, for they were too clumsy for any 
beast's — and as he " froze " Smythe's dog, 
following at his master's heels, growled 
suddenly and checked. Smythe stopped, 
rooted. The Saint was still as a tree. 

Then Smythe said something low and 
quick, and the dog sprang with a roar. 
181 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

Followed a whirl in the inky void, a quick 
and horrible growling, a rush of smothered 
snarlings, a yell from the dog, and silence. 
The dog came back with a three-inch gash 
on his shoulder, and the Saint went away in 
a hurry because both barrels of Smythe's 
gun had sent quite a number of shot singing 
and whining at his heels. But Smythe 
never saw him. He only heard the rustle of 
his passage. 

When the Saint struck Glenask things 
happened. He was hungry, he was angry, 
and here was a moor full of game, a close- 
trapped place where Hardway's harried 
ones had found shelter. No need was there 
for his marvelous hunting knowledge, a 
single bound scooped up one grouse, and a 
second, lightning quick as the covey rose, 
slashed down a second. 

Later, his hunger appeased, he turned to 
the cooling of his anger. From far away, 
on the gale, came the sound of a thing that 
was in trouble, so that it could not refrain 
from yelling. Him the Saint stalked, and the 
stalk ended in a trapped stoat which swiftly, 
182 



THE SAINT 



with the wolverene's assistance, became a 
dead stoat. The rest was easy ; needed only 
to trail Macgregor, who had set that trap, 
and every trap on that part of the moor — 
ten in all — was successfully dealt with after 
his own gentle and peculiar fashion. After 
that he moved down to Mac's cottage itself, 
where he spent the rest of that night, mock- 
ing at the chained dogs, sampling the blood 
of Mac's fowls, and generally stirring 
things up. 

Next dawning Mac's flaming beard, 
thrust in at the fowl-shed door, fairly 
bristled at the sight of the butcher's-shop 
that was within. 

"Ach," said Mac. "I'm thinking he's 
come." 

Then Mac fetched his rifle, cast loose four 
beagles, flung them once round the fowl- 
house, and in five minutes was toiling, pant- 
ing, up the glen in the wake of as fine a 
burst of hound music as ever wakened the 
echoes of a misty morning. 

The Saint heard the din from the bowels 
of a hollow tree in a pine wood and bared 
183 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

glistening fangs superciliously. It was a 
new discord to him. It might mean any- 
thing, or nothing. Anyway, he was in good 
hiding — he would sleep. But the riot in- 
creased until, with a crash, it broke round 
his tree— broke and raged and surged again. 
Then it ceased. 

The wolverene was fully awake now. He 
was, as nearly as could be, alarmed, and for 
good reason. Mac was chopping down the 
tree. Ignominiously he turned him out of 
the crashing down trunk, turned him out 
into blinding sun, to fight for his life. With 
his back against another tree, in a flash, he 
faced the hounds. He had to. There was 
nothing else for it. Followed a bar-like 
gleam as the sun glinted along a rifle barrel, 
a tiny stab of flame, a sharp, short report, 
and the Saint stiffened all over, drew him- 
self up to his full height, leaped straight at 
the pack, and fell in mid-leap — dead. 

Silently Mac buried him and silently he 

went home. He said nothing about the 

matter to anyone and has continued to say 

nothing ever since. You ask him to-day 

184 



THE SAINT 



what is a wolverene? He will simply an- 
swer: 

" Now, ye'U understand, I'm in noo sense 
paid to study Natural Heestory." 

And that is all. 



185 



FLIGHTS ABROAD 



FLIGHTS ABROAD 

HE had come down from the clouds 
and landed upon a black grouse 
chick as if by accident. In those 
days — it was the year 1809 — black grouse 
were more plentiful than they are now, 
which may or may not explain many things 
that follow. The chick let forth one treble 
squawk and then sputtered out of life like 
a candle extinguished by a wet hand. 
Thereafter the apparition removed itself to 
the top branch of a tree, amid varied ex- 
clamations and much battering from the late 
chick's ma, a gray hen whose bearings were 
somewhat heated, as it were. 

There may be finer-looking birds, and 
there are fiercer pirates of the air, but as a 
picture of rapine this specimen, carved — 
from hooked bill and taloned claw to great 
swallow-tail and clean-cut, raking wings— 
189 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

as if in old oak, even to the black graining, 
surmounting a naked, lightning-blasted tree 
against the angry burning circle of the dying 
sun, this, I say, was a sight to return in 
dreams for a lifetime. Before science he 
was a black or migratory kite and had no 




Before Science He Was a Black or Migratory 

Kite and Had No Business Where He 

Was at All 

business where he was at all — for which he 
did not thank a southeast gale. Before the 
world, at this moment, he was a masterpiece 
of nature's carving. 

Something flashed in the gorse bushes. 

Somebody moved a head; and, lone and 

masterless, a bullet cut sharp off the bough 

on which the kite sat. Then came a report 

190 



FLIGHTS ABROAD 



and a smother of smoke, and, thanks to the 
latter, the kite righted himself as he fell and 
sought the horizon not slowly. It was his 
first introduction to a musket, his baptism 
of fire, and like all birds of prey, who are 
highly strung to a degree and hate noise al- 
most as much as a cat does, he was upset for 
an hour after and shied at everything he 
saw. 

As the South Downs slid past in quick 
time beneath him a buzzard got up out of a 
hawthorn and rose toward him in gigantic 
circles, mewing in what it meant to be an 
angry tone, but which only succeeded in be- 
ing plaintive and absurd for such an ample- 
winged free-booter. The buzzard had a 
nest in the hawthorn and saw, therefore, a* 
menace to her peace in everything that flew, 
but the kite knew nothing of that and cared 
less. He had seen a pigeon go into a tree 
where the Downs died into the Weald, and 
he was going to have that pigeon, buzzard 
or no buzzard. 

He let himself down in hundred-foot 
stages, quite indifferent to the gale, and the 
191 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

buzzard followed. Then he turned and fell 
upon the buzzard with a scream borrowed 
from some fury or other, and that bird col- 
lapsed and fled, still mewing into the teeth 
of the gale, for buzzards have the appear- 
ance of an eagle and the heart of a rabbit. 

For a moment the kite hove to, swinging 
in the wind as only a kite can, bewildered at 
the easy victory, then he surrendered him- 
self to the gale and, with still wings, was 
hurled away down- wind in the wake of the 
pigeon. 

Just as it seemed that he was doomed to 
end his days with a broken neck among the 
branches of an oak, he gave a twist, rudder 
fashion, to his immense forked tail, swung, 
hung, and drifted slowly up a branch on the 
leeward side of the tree. There may be 
other birds capable of harnessing the wind to 
their needs with a minimum amount of ef- 
fort and a maximum amount of skill, not 
forgetting for one second to be graceful, 
but I do not know them. 

The pigeon was in a tree farther up the 
hedgerow, dreaming of peas. In front of 
192 



FLIGHTS ABROAD 



him other pigeons were doing their utmost 
to complete the ruin that the weeds had be- 
gun in a pea field, and half a dozen jays 
were playing the fool closer in and near the 
edge of a wood to the right. 

The kite beheld these jays with no joy at 
all ; it was nothing to him if they were a won- 
derfully pretty picture of life and color — 
which they certainly were. They happened 
to be between him and his prey, and he knew 
the pigeons would break for cover directly 
the jays gave the alarm. 

He sat on, therefore, rigid, erect, and 
scowling the indescribable, aloof, haughty 
scowl of all rapacious birds. A thick-knee 
plover dropped off the Downs and settled 
twenty yards away. A raven croaked a 
thick, evil croak somewhere up the slope, and 
a badger rooted for acorns among last year's 
leaves under the very oak on which he sat. 

Then — oh horrors! — what was that? 
Came a rush of wings — they might have 
been waves for the noise they made — and 
five great bodies sailed by on either side of 
the tree. They landed on the field with a 
193 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 



confusion which seemed to have blown the 
pigeons up like flickering scraps of paper, 
while the jays became scarce in exactly 
seven and a quarter seconds. 

If they had been eagles the confusion 
could not have been more complimentary. 
They were only bustards, however, great 
bustards, the same that the country folk of 
the Downs called wild turkeys, which they 
most decidedly were not. 

The kite opened his eyes wide when he 
beheld the great, black-moustached, white- 
breasted, brown cock birds, and something 
began to work in the place where he kept 
his memory at the back of his brain. Then 
one of the giants — they were giants, being 
not less than three and a half feet tall, said 
" Prunt ! " loudly and very deep down in his 
throat, and the kite jumped as if a wasp had 
stung him. The last time he had heard that 
call-note was when his mate was robbing a 
bustard's nest in Africa, and the lord and 
master of that nest had arrived and in turn 
robbed his mate — of her life. 

The pigeons did not return, for which the 
194 



FLIGHTS ABROAD 



kite blamed the bustards, and the huge birds 
annexed the field unto themselves, driving 
off all visitors as if they paid rent and tithe. 
And all the time the kite fairly danced with 
rage on his branch. He was ravenous, for 
one thing, and for another he hated those 
birds with the deadly hatred that grows up 
in a lonely heart against the cause of the 
loneliness; for a third, the day was dying 
and with it his chance of making a kill. 

Perhaps it was the fact that one of the 
cock bustards had white wings instead of ai 
white breast, as with all the rest, and white 
is a good mark in the dusk and shows up 
well for those who prowl on the lookout for 
something to kill. Came a roar like 
thunder which danced all over the Downs 
and came back again. The bustards erupted 
into the air in a chaotic, flapping cloud and 
beat into the eye of the setting sun, not 
slowly, and with a scandalous amount of 
noise. 

Some one had fired a gun at them fronl 
behind that hedge, that was clear. It was 
also clear that the shot was a wasted one. 
195 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

But the keen-eyed kite saw more than the 
man. The white-winged bustard had passed 
him close and the bird of prey knew that 
his meal was safe, after all. That bustard 
carried three leaden slugs " where he lived," 
as the saying is. 

Then the kite followed as a; jackal fol- 
lows ; saw the wounded one swerve from the 
swift-moving flock; marked where he 
dropped to earth, and ran for cover. Then, 
in the fullness of time, the kite dropped and 
finished the work that the lead had begun 
and slept on a tree above his banquet after. 

There is wind and wind. That which 
emanates from the southwest, to which point 
of the compass it had shifted from the south- 
east, and hits the South Downs full on the 
cheek can, upon occasion, create a fair-sized 
bluster. Never had that kite known such a 
wind, and he was by way of being a wind 
expert, too. 

The tree whereon he lodged was not a 

small tree, a Scotch fir, and the same are a 

well-anchored type. The wind troubled it 

badly and turned it into a buck- jumping 

196 



FLIGHTS ABROAD 



death trap. It kicked, it shivered, it 
pranced, it doubled, it threshed, it knelt, it 
reared, it bowed — this was when the father 
of all the gusts took it in the top branches — 
it tickled its toes with its ringers, it caressed 
all its arms with all its other arms — here the 
kite retired to the main trunk in a hurry — it 
combed its hair feverishly — and slew two 
roosting missel-thrushes in the process — it 
broke its oldest arm, but not clean off, and 
the useless limb, hanging loose, threshed 
about masterless to the detriment of half 
the other limbs and the buzzards, which it 
brained scientifically. Finally the tree 
started a crazy stand-up fight with its near- 
est neighbor, a pine on the right, much to 
the horror and damage of the numerous 
winged lodgers on both combatants. 

When he had got used to seeing his own 
tail bent, umbrella fashion, over his head, 
had become accustomed to viewing the world 
at all known and unknown angles, often up- 
side down, and had mastered the art of sleep- 
ing between gusts, a thing without a name 
hit the kite on the back and clung there 
197 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

screaming. It had come from nowhere 
special and apparently was bound for a like 
destination, and it must have been mad, be- 
cause it affected to believe that the kite's 
back was as good a perch as any other. 

Thanks to his patent automatic lock 
grasp, the kite did not tumble inconse- 
quently and promptly to his doom. He 
hung on — while the tree seemed on the point 
of retiring into the northeast — and shivered 
with fright amid the roar and confusion. 
Since, however, he had long ago run out of 
all known species of terror and was incap- 
able of summoning up any further fear that 
would do justice to the position, he began to 
act. 

Well he knew that to let go his perch 
meant in all probability letting go of his life 
also, so there was nothing for it but the beak. 
He turned upon himself and investigated 
the unknown thing with his clawlike bill and 
struck feathers. Then they fought. 

It was in no manner an ordinary kind of 
fight, you will understand, for both com- 
batants were mad with fear of anything 
198 



FLIGHTS ABROAD 



and everything to begin with. Also they 
had to stop about every thirty seconds to 
meet the gusts and hang on for dear life. 
Moreover, they were more than likely to be 
brained by the flying branches at any 
moment. 

In the end the enemy lost his hold and 
vanished like a blown sheet of white paper 
into the howling blackness. I think he was 
a barn-owl. At least, his eyes shone and his 
color was suggestive of such. 

In the pale gray of an exhausted dawn 
the wind went down with the tide, backing 
to the north, and five black specks slid up in 
slow time out of the east. They were the 
mourners, come to bury that Caesar of the 
wilds, the bustard. Rather, perhaps, they 
were the grave-diggers, and the grave was 
themselves and the spades were their own 
beaks. 

The kite had no love for these black ones, 
carrion crows by the look of them, and he 
beheld them without enthusiasm. He had 
just one minute five seconds to breakfast on 
bustard, and he did not fall asleep. As an 
199 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

exhibition of quick gorge it was amazing. 
That corpse changed considerably in appear- 
ance in that interval. 

"Kra-a! Kra-a! Kra-a!" 

Thanks. Time up. That was the bull- 
necked, black-visaged, and blacker-hearted 
crows inviting him to " get," and since they 
had all the guns, he quitted reluctantly and 
heavily, calling down curses of awful im- 
port on the foe as he went. 

He swung in circles over the ample, blunt- 
nosed Downs, watching the day folk wake 
up and salute the golden torrents of sun- 
shine. There are no words to describe the 
wonder of this bird's flight, the serene, still- 
winged, calm, and wondrous soaring, the 
flawless curves, the easy sweeps, every poise 
brimming with infinite grace, all accom- 
plished, all made possible, by that forked 
tail and the scientific use of the same. 

A hare limped over the rolling heights 
and passed. A thickknee plover ran, half 
crouching, across the stony waste of a bare 
patch. A couple of herring-gulls drew sil- 
ver streaks against the blue-gray wonder of 
200 



FLIGHTS ABROAD 



the turf below, and a shepherd stood, a 
gaunt, cloaked figure, leaning on his crook, 
above the white cliffs frowning seaward. 

Then a buzzard came flapping with noise- 
less flight up over the shoulder of a brow 
and dropped sliding into a hollow, where 
the turtle-dove had dived for a hawthorn. 
Both birds vanished, and the skylarks 
seemed to be the only living things left in all 
that simple sweep of sky and hill. Then 
out of the tangle below shot the turtle-dove, 
and dropped like a falling projectile into the 
dim, black, timbered mystery of the Sussex 
Weald. Followed a yell and a great 
flapping from the hawthorns, but the buz- 
zard did not appear. 

When the kite fell to investigate and, 
settling on a bough, peered into the heaped 
confusion of age-old hawthorn and gorse 
beneath which the earthworks thrown up by 
the rabbits and badgers shone white, he could 
see nothing. Some one in that labyrinth 
was in trouble so that they could not help 
saying so, flapping huge wings and screech- 
ing like half a dozen fiends. Closer investi- 
301 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

gation, however, unearthed the buzzard at 
loggerheads with a trap which had been 
baited with a turtle-dove's egg. 

The kite preened his feathers and sat 
down as one who is used to waiting. In one 
hour or ten — what did it matter?— that buz- 
zard would beat his strength out and be ex- 
hausted. Then a hungry kite might, with 
dextrous claws and beak, help that trap and 
finish the work so well begun by the con- 
trivance. 

It was the ship's bell that awoke him. I 
think he dozed in the stagnant sunshine. 
There was, so far as he remembered, no wind 
in this cuplike hollow, nor above it, for the 
matter of that. Only, the air was full of 
skylark's song as the air of a church is filled 
with the sound of an organ and the ceaseless 
hum of the countless insects rose all about. 

There seemed no interval between this 
and waking to a dead, dumb, chill, gray si- 
lence, shattered only at intervals by the 
alarmed and hurried, fretful beating of a 
ship's bell, an annoying sound — quite close 
%0% 



FLIGHTS ABROAD 



it seemed and made by nothing at all so far 
as eyes could see. It was characteristic of 
the bird — of all the wild folk — that he was 
awake in a wink; awake not only, but alert 
and alive, possessed at once and fully mas- 
ter of all his faculties; and he stared at — 
nothing ! 

Swiftly and without warning, as without 
sound, the shrouded horror of the sea-fog 
had reared its coils up from the Channel 
like a hooded cobra and blotted out the day 
in a treble-welted, blanketing, swirling, 
dripping, menacing mystery. 

The kite shook out his feathers and shiv- 
ered. He was not used to this sort of thing. 
He felt inclosed, as it were, compassed 
about. He found, to his horror, that he 
could not see ten yards, and if a bird cannot 
see far he is done. He is in such circum- 
stances as helpless as a fowl in deep snow, 
and that is very helpless indeed. 

The buzzard was quiet now and might, 
if the kite could only summon up courage, 
be slain with care. About this time, how- 
ever, he became aware of a movement 
203 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

among the gorse. There was no wind, not 
a particle, and the fog cloaked anything and 
everything. 

Goodness knows what danger might be 
behind that movement. Next moment a 
form reared up out of space barely two 
yards away, and the kite's eyes almost 
jumped out of his head. It was a man, just 
an ordinary man, the shepherd who had set 
that trap, but the fog turned him into a 
giant of awful import. 

Because the kite was sitting quite still the 
man had not seen him. He carried a gun, 
at least he called it such, but whom it might 
kill save its owner was questionable. A 
shepherd of to-day would not have used such 
a weapon for much money. The only thing 
more doubtful about this weapon than 
whether it might or might not go off when it 
was wanted was whether it would kill the 
quarry or its owner. 

The man did not see the going of that 
kite. He heard it, however, a whistling of 
scimitar wings, and he fired at random — an 
awful roar — and hit nothing. 
204 



FLIGHTS ABROAD 



Those who are not acquainted with the 
winged ones have little idea how they can 
play with distance. That kite had not 
cleaved through fifty yards of smothering 
fog before he was lost utterly and irrevoc- 
ably, but he went straight ahead and with 
the wind, and was well over Brittany before 
he stopped. Here he " held up " a part- 
ridge out on an afternoon stroll and started 
to open up its breast without further ado. 
Then more fog, and more blind flying, 
frightened out of all its wits, and, of course, 
with the wind, till night. 

Somewhere in the middle of the night, 
when he had attained a truly terrifying 
height, he picked up his bearings. Below, 
as it were on a map, a silver sheet of glass 
stretched into the south. There was no 
wind, or very little, but what there was had 
no chill, nor was it damp, and he knew he 
had struck the Mediterranean. 

Dawn — all blazoned in saffron and gold 
and purple — discovered a very tired kite 
asleep and snoring in a niche high up in 
205 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 



some forgotten tomb of one of Egypt's de- 
parted great. He opened one eye and 
glared out over sand rolling like a sea, and 
showing back gold for gold, sand parched 
and pitiless, sand scarcely yet cool from the 
heat of yesterday. All around him were 
temples crumbling to decay, and the kite 
screamed in pure, insolent joy. He had 
found his native Africa at last. 

No care was there like the care with which 
he preened his feathers that morning ; no 
stretching so glorious as the stretching of 
each stiff, rustling, wonderful pinion and 
brutally clawed leg to the heat of that sun 
— his sun — that his being rejoiced in and 
knew. The dryness of it all — this perch 
dusted with the dust of centuries, the air, the 
river bed gleaming white and waterless a 
hundred yards away, the glaring sand, the 
palms so still and tall and calm, and above 
all the little dust devils, the baby whirlwinds 
that came from nowhere and went no- 
whither, that danced across the plain in 
twisting sand-clouds and died, falling cloak- 
wise — flop ! 

206 



FLIGHTS ABROAD 




He Knew That a Caravan Meant a City Sooner 

or Later, and It May Mean Food 

207 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

Then he rose calm and sublime, cir- 
cling in the molten gold that was fading to 
blue. He marked where a pair of cream- 
colored coursers ran as swiftly as hares over 
the swelling waste, making things un- 
pleasant for the countless grasshoppers. 
He, or his shadow rather, surprised a bunch 
of pin-tailed grouse at business with what- 
ever these strange birds find to feed upon, 
and they promptly froze and became of the 
sand sandy. He upset — literally — a quail 
sunning himself on a stone, and would have 
had him if a caracal — and the same is a beast 
like a spare, smooth-coated, tawny lynx — 
had not sprung up out of the very ground — 
at least, so it seemed — and annexed the 
quarry for himself. 

Later he sighted a caravan, a string of 
stately, sour-tempered camels, more or less 
obeying men as stately — and certainly as 
picturesquely dirty — as themselves. He 
knew that a caravan meant a city sooner or 
later, and it may mean food, and he drew 
circles, compasslike, above it, screaming the 
while in pure delight of life. 
208 



FLIGHTS ABROAD 



The city that he and the caravan ran up 
against an hour later was — from a distance 
— a white splendor floating on an ocean of 
sand. The city, as he investigated it at close 
quarters, was a sink — no less. It was, how- 
ever, his personal idea of a perfect city— -that 
is to say, a place where one might find 
enough refuse to feed upon. 

Suddenly he slanted downward. A man 
had been killing sheep somewhere and, com- 
ing to the city wall, cast out some bones. 
They were good bones, with meat on them 
enough for any kite. This he found when 
he settled, and since they were too heavy to 
carry -conveniently, he tackled them where 
they lay. 

"G-r-r-r-r!" 

The sound seemed to come up out of the 
ground, and with it, over a huge block of 
stone, rose a dog. The kite had seen some 
specimens of the pariah, the ownerless, more 
than half- wild dog of all African cities, but 
this lean, limping, leering insult to the regal 
sunlight was as sad an accident as he had 
ever clapped eyes upon. 
209 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 



Knowing the breed, he did not at once re- 
treat, but gave back a scream that threat- 
ened many things, which, by the way, he was 
incapable of doing. The dog came on. 
Except for its appearance, it might have 
been a cat by its walk. It slid forward on 
its belly, in an atmosphere of growls and 
snapping yellow fangs. 




He Dare Not Take His Eyes Off the Crouching, 
Advancing Red Shape in Front of Him 

The kite never saw the vultures that came 
and removed the other bones, because he 
dare not take his eyes off the crouching, ad- 
vancing red shape in front of him. He 
heard them, however; a hissing of great 
bodies and greater wings, another hissing, 
not of wings, but throats, and a passing 
" frou frou " of stiff pinions as they re- 
moved. 

210 



FLIGHTS ABROAD 



An abortive attempt on his part to fly 
away with the bone proved disastrous. He 
got four feet above the ground and dropped 
it, and the mangy apology for a dog dived in 
and secured the booty. 

For this he received as a reward half a 
dozen daggers embodied in a whirlwind on 
his back and removed about four yards in 
two seconds, ki-yi-ing at the top of his voice. 
It was sudden and unexpected, that attack, 
and it might have been an eagle. One never 
knows, if one is an animal in these swelter- 
ing lands, what manner of winged horror 
may descend. But it was no eagle, only 
the kite who was sliding in a sort of mixed- 
up run, fly, and hop over the next rise. 

That dog started warlike operations for 
the recovery of that feed, and let himself go 
for the rise full speed ahead. Then some- 
thing did something in his path, and he 
twisted around three times before he fled in 
an opposite direction. He had only run into 
a horned viper, quite a small matter, since he 
was a dog of no account, but — well, the vul- 
tures attended his funeral later. 
211 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

Not long after that our kite swung on still 
wings out to the miserable huts that hid be- 
neath the palms where the city died into the 
sand. He was lost in thought, apparently, 
till a flock of pigeons got up off a roof and 
twinkled down into a field, where some man 
more courageous than his fellows had tried 
to coax a crop out of the sandy earth. 

There is no ease at all in singling a pigeon, 
which knows exactly what you are up to, out 
of a flock, cutting him off from all things in 
the shape of cover, and hunting him against 
his will into the open. Yet this the kite did, 
hugging the mazelike dodging of his quarry, 
'the turns borrowed from a lightning flash, 
the drops and dives that were heralded by no 
warning, the twists that deceived the quick- 
est eye, the falls that threatened to end in a 
broken neck and did end only in up-flung, 
nerve-quivering ascents. 

There was something startling and unex- 
pected in the remorseless, fiery energy this 
bird of prey threw into the chase ; something 
almost uncanny in the fury and the speed of 
it, which seemed out of place with that sub- 
212 



FLIGHTS ABROAD 



lime, placid sailing that he had made so 
peculiarly his own. 

That pigeon was not made of steel. After 
all, he was only a pigeon, and even pigeons, 
fine players as they are, have their limits. 
His limit arrived quite suddenly, and he 
threw up the sponge with a hopeless flutter- 
ing, like a stricken butterfly, to the parched, 
hard, glistening sand. The kite who knew 
no mercy— as he never expected to receive 
any — was unthinkingly merciful. A blow 
of that black, razor-edged beak and the pig- 
eon was dead. The end was much more 
merciful than the chase. 

This hunting had a purpose behind it. 
The j ourney was not yet accomplished. The 
kite had farther to go, and he, like Napo- 
leon's army, flew on his belly, after all's 
said and done. 

In another hour he beat out over the 
desert, not gracefully now or on still wings, 
but purposefully and on stately beating 
pinions. He flew with the air of one who 
had come far and was aware of many more 
miles to follow. 

213 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

There is no space to tell of that journey; 
of how he dodged the eagle and gained the 
cover of a mimosa tree two inches in front of 
a saker falcon! How he descended upon a 
dying spur- winged goose and how the goose 
made one last struggle and almost slew him 
in the process and a crocodile ended the mat- 
ter by removing the goose! How he came 
upon a caravan of men dying of thirst and 
saw ivory dropped by the wayside as if it 
were refuse and one man said— but this he 
did not understand— that the ivory had 
taken fifty lives in the getting ! And how in 
the night, after the men were gone, hyenas 
came to gnaw at the ivory and could make 
no impression upon it! How Kilimanjaro, 
the mountain of mountains, snow-peaked, 
dominant, and superb even at thirty miles' 
distance, loomed out of the night and he 
went to sleep in a candelabra tree and snored 
lustily till dawn! 

Even if it were not impossible, it would be 
profanation to attempt to describe the su- 
preme glory of the sunrise next morning as 
the kite beheld it from his perch by the 
214 



FLIGHTS ABROAD 



mighty candelabra tree, with the weaver 
birds darting in and out of their great and 
wonderful hanging nests all around him. 
The roaring, rampant day swept up in full 
blast. 

Hosts of Egyptian and spur-winged 
geese rose along the line of marshes before 
him. Spur-winged lapwings drew mazes in 
the air, and dainty black and white avocets 
crossed athwart the reed forest in streaking 
lines. Eagles with white heads and tails 
sailed above the glassy water, which was 
shattered every few moments into diamond 
splinters by hosts of rising fish, and pink and 
red flamingoes stood out in solid ranks 
against the chocolate brown of the mud- 
banks. 

To the right dust clouds rose as though 
from marching armies — armies indeed, but 
animals. He marked the bull-necked gnus 
in herds, and the gaudy zebras, and the 
hartebeests with long hammer heads; the 
stately lyre-horned Grant's gazelles, the 
swinging necks of the giraffes like masts of 
ships rising above the sea of dust, and the 
215 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

quick moving black and white blotches of 
ostriches all returning to the veldt for the 
day. 

A great blackish patch grew slowly into 
the reeds. Followed a roar, mighty as the 
roar of a lion but more ponderous, the chal- 
lenge of a bull-hippopotamus. Another 
great blotch grew out of the reeds and moved 
slowly across the veldt. A spear flash fol- 
lowed. The blotch swerved, kicked up dust, 
and moved quickly; even at the distance he 
could hear the snorting of a rhinoceros. 
Later, when the hunters had given up the 
folly of following it among the reed forests, 
he helped the vultures and marabout storks 
to bury it. 

Later also, when the crowd around the 
dead rhinoceros became too thick and began 
to lose its temper, and the marabouts slung 
their great pickax beaks about too recklessly 
to be safe, he removed him to the veldt. He 
dropped upon a ground squirrel — the earth 
was rotten with their burrows in some places 
— and missed his prey by half a hair's 
breadth. He found a dwarf -antelope fawn 
216 



FLIGHTS ABROAD 



among some wait-a-bit thorn, but its mother 
appeared and he remembered an appoint- 
ment elsewhere. 

Then a griffon vulture passed in hot haste, 
intimating that a leopard had killed a baboon 
a mile away, but when he got there the 
leopard was guarding his kill, and though he 
loafed about for an hour in the company of 
half a dozen disconsolate vultures, he got 
nothing. A musket report brought him 
back to an acacia clump where he found an 
enraged lion looking for three men who were 
up a tree, but the lion seemed far too lively 
to die yet awhile and he left him still looking 
for those men. 

Later he came upon a bustard — even one 
of his old foes — who seemed to have some- 
thing wrong with his flying machinery. 
The bustard, however, demonstrated that his 
beak was in working order, and our kite, 
knowing something of the obliterating power 
of an angry bustard's beak, left the whole 
contrivance to be interviewed by a jackal. 

Loafing — always in circles, always on still 
wings — over the burnt and staring veldt, he 
217 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

became aware of birds beneath him. He did 
not see them. Only he heard them, and he 
wondered where in the name of flight, 



~y 



&&? 




The First Sand Grouse Was Down Again, the 

Kite on Top of It 

218 



FLIGHTS ABROAD 



feathers, and talons they might be. In the 
wild there is a saying expressive of quick 
sight — " Eyes of a kite," they say. Here, 
however, the eyes of a kite saw nothing but 
sun-blistered earth, sand, and boulders. 

He sank as if he were a feather floating 
down. Settled he upon the ground and 
sidled forward. Then he almost fell over 
something, which got up in his face with a 
squawk, and all the ground about seemed 
to vomit birds. Pin-tail sand grouse, by 
thunder! They had been squatting there 
close all the time, harmonizing most beauti- 
fully with all things about them. 

A rush of wings, a burst of feathers, a 
scuffle, and the first sand grouse was down 
again, the kite on top of it. 

Another rush of wings, mightier than the 
first. Another scuffle. Another burst of 
feathers, and the kite was down. A tre- 
mendous and awful apparition of a bird, 
known but vaguely to men as a war-like 
crested eagle, was on top of him. And there 
the story, and the life of our black kite ended 

quite abruptly thus !!!! 

219 



LONE LUCK 



LONE LUCK 

SLOUCH, slouch, slouch, slouch. You 
could tell him for a " long dog " half a 
mile away by his walk alone. But 
what the wondrous happenings was he do- 
ing here? 

His master kept a " barrer " down Com- 
mercial Road way (and that is " East ") and 
he kept his master. He was a lurcher, one 
part bull-dog, three parts greyhound, and 
poaching was his trade. Still, what was he 
doing here? 

It all came about by his master " dot- 
ting " a fellow " barrer " owner " one on the 
snitch," and the " dottee " falling backwards 
with his head against the curb. Result — 
broken head on the one hand and " fourteen 
days hard " on the other. 

Now, his master's " Missus " disapproved 
of poaching, not on a point of modesty, but 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

morals. Even a coster may object to her 
husband being out all night. The "long 
dog " was party to these nocturnal philan- 
derings. Right! — the long dog should go. 
And the long dog went — while his master 
languished philosophically through his 
" fourteen days." To " a cousin in the coun- 
try " went the long dog — always slouching 
— and the fact that the country was wild, 
mountainous, and desolate had no concern 
for the poacher's wife. Country held for 
her only one meaning; a place outside Lon- 
don, as distinct from that other place out- 
side London, the sea to wit. 

And the " long dog " said no word, which, 
as you may have observed, is particularly 
and especially the " long dog's " strong 
point all England over. Possibly this is 
why they are unbeloved of women. 

Unhappily the " long dog " disapproved 
of the " cousin in the country " — disap- 
proved of him all round. The hymn meet- 
ings on Sunday evenings, the sleeping when 
all was quiet and dark, the steady work, the 
lack of appreciation when the " long dog " 
2M 



LONE LUCK 




What He Knew as a " Drummer 



landed what he called a " red 'un," and the 

cousin "t' Laird's cock bird;" the beating 

225 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

which followed upon the clever scooping in 
of what he knew as a " drummer " and the 
cousin as a rabbit, and above all the starched, 
soaped, clean, clipped, and washen honesty 
were distasteful to the " long dog " beyond 
words. But, being a " long dog," he said 
no word. He removed — into the landscape. 

From that time the " long dog " ceased 
to be an appendage. He wrapped himself 
about with mystery. From that time, also, 
his doings ceased to be in the knowledge of 
men, and we must turn to the wild if we 
would follow them. So far as man was 
concerned he became a sort of living con- 
jecture. 

He wrote his name in red across the coun- 
try-side, but no man saw him, or if they did, 
'twas but a whip-like vanishing tail, or a 
fading tan dot half a mile away that they 
could not swear to. He became an elusive 
factor in the scheme of things, a power be- 
hind the scenes. Every gamekeeper, every 
shepherd, every poultry keeper within a 
radius of twenty miles had to take the " long 
dog " into consideration each evening when 
226 



LONE LUCK 



planning the next day's work. In one 
bound he leaped to fame. 

The " long dog " shook the incubus of his 
collar from his neck with a suggestive ease 
at 12:15 a. m., upon a night. The chain 
did not clank as he did so. With a single 
bound he cleared the wall that encircled the 
cousin's back-yard, stood for a moment 
hesitating — a statuesque figure full in the 
middle of the moonlit village street — and 
evaporated. 

There was in this making off a wonder- 
ful mastery of the art of the business. No 
man saw the going of the " long dog," nor 
did any hear him. He must have passed 
by many sleeping house dogs, yet they never 
saw. Self effacement was almost a science 
with him, and — though he did not know it — 
self effacement is one of the rules of life in 
the wild to which he was going. 

Anon he left the road and — like the Span- 
ish smuggler who had committed a murder 
— took to the mountains. 

You picture him a lonely figure, head and 
tail pointing at the ground, back arched, and 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

with a general air of out at heels despond- 
ency, breasting the flank of a hill, slouch- 
ing always with that easy lope which had, 
though he did not know it, descended to him 
almost unaltered from the wolves his ances- 
tors. Out of the tail of his eye he noted all 
things, his ears missed no sound, and what 
ears and eyes may by miracle have over- 
looked the tireless nose — gotten of his bull- 
dog grandparent — caught, analyzed, tested, 
sampled, and mentally noted. Yet to the 
uneducated eye he appeared about as ob- 
servant as a child's wooden horse. 

It was very still and every little sound 
magnified itself as it does in a cave. Some- 
where from the deep shadow on the edge of 
a beech- wood came a sound as of beating on 
palings with a stick, and once a hollow 
sound, one-third grunt, one-third cough, 
and the other roar. By these noises 
one knew there were stags fighting in that 
wood. Farther on, where the " long dog " 
skirted a hollow filled like a pond to the 
brim with purple heather, a thing sat up- 
right and motionless on a tooth of rock and 



LONE LUCK 



barked at him like a dog, but it was a long- 
eared owl and it flew away sighing un- 
cannily when he started to investigate. 

In a dell he surprised a big dog-fox roll- 
ing, dog fashion, in the moonlight, and 
shortly after as he skirted a forbidding black 
belt of pines the cathedral silence that 
reigned among the pillared aisles was shat- 
tered by a series of absolutely diabolical 
yells and screams and moans, sounds so aw- 
ful that they made one sweat. They fol- 
lowed him, these cries as of lost souls in tor- 
ment, followed him and encompassed him 
about, now in front, now in rear, now in 
flank, now away, now near, and once he 
turned suddenly and snarled a side-long 
snarl — you could see the white fangs flash 
like bared steel in the moonlight — at two 
ghostly phosphorescent green eyes that 
peered suddenly at him out of the pine- 
scented gloom. 

Remembering the ghostliness of the scene 
— black pine cut out against green white 
moon, in a setting of blue-black, lead gray, 
pearl where the mist lay, and pure jet hills 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

— these noises might have been the war 
song of ghouls gathering to the feast, but 
they weren't. The still small voice of fact 
says they were the remarks of a mother 
vixen hanging on the heels of the " long 
dog " and warning her cubs as to the direc- 
tion of his route. This may have spoiled 
the illusion, but it is true, and explains the 
presence of him who rolled in the naked 
moonlight and the " long dog's " path to 
draw him away on another scent. 

But the " long dog " was attending 
strictly to business and became interested in 
a blue shadow gliding down hill in the open. 
It was a mountain hare and it brought the 
" long dog " up all standing. For the first 
time he lifted his drooped head, stared, and 
— was down the hill. The change from 
slack slouching to speed incarnate was 
dramatic as well as startling. It ex- 
plained, among other things, the whole 
reason of the " long dog's " existence. Also 
it changed him in a flash from merely a cur 
to a poetic embodiment of speed and it 
caused the vixen, cubs and all, to remove 
230 



LONE LUCK 



swiftly in the opposite direction without say- 
ing a word. 

The hare, being a hare and gifted by 
Nature and her father's kismet with the 
power to see behind, did not fail of her 
reputation. She shot away like a blue 
streak, remembering that she was at a dis- 
advantage on the down grade — as all hares 
are by reason of their long hind legs — let the 
" long dog " catch up at full speed, mean- 
ing to double in time so as to get on the up 
grade, and — was ignominiously snapped up. 

In drawing from her experience of grey- 
hounds she had overlooked one fact, the 
greyhound takes his hare flying and in nine 
cases out of ten is beaten and goes whirling 
on helplessly at the double. The lurcher 
does not; he slackens a fraction of a second 
before the double and comes round as 
quickly as the hare. This is called " run- 
ning cunning " in coursing parlance, and a 
greyhound would be disqualified for so do- 
ing, but it fetches the hare all right enough. 

Habit of retrieving, and not a fear of any 
wild foe, caused the dog to pick up the hare 
231 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

and break for cover. He even turned and 
ran a little way back to the village with his 
capture, so strongly ingrained was the cus- 
tom of taking all captures to his master. 
He thought better of it, however, and fed, 
silently save for the cracking of bones, all 
alone under the low hanging wholes of the 
fir. 

He was still engaged in this, to him, quite 
new delight— his own master would have 
flayed him alive for the unpardonable sin of 
eating his quarry — when the feeling that he 
was no longer alone seized upon him. They 
say that one may experience this feeling, 
the uncanny sensation of being watched by 
unseen eyes, in most Indian palaces, but 
those who live in the wild know that there 
this sensation is always with you. There is 
no getting away from it; a hundred tiny 
eyes are forever marking your footsteps, 
noting your every move. Only, however, 
when the eyes belong to something big does 
the feeling become intolerable. 

The " long dog " ceased feeding suddenly 
and — mark the thin line which divided him 
232 



LONE LUCK 



from the wild folk 
and had snapped — 
without lifting his 
head, listened. His 
muscles became 
tense — he was ready 
to bound in every di- 
rection at a sound — 
but he had not lifted 
his head. He did not 
show the watcher he 
was alert, lest that 
same draw back and 
fail to disclose itself. 
In the wild it is the 
hidden danger that 
kills. He was look- 
ing sideways out of 
the corners of his 
eyes. His nose was 
" working." 

Suddenly he knew 
that full in the moonlight, not forty yards 
away, a beast was standing and had moved 
— had jerked its head round to brush away 




The Beast Was a Roe 
Deer 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

an obtrusive mosquito — and in the moving 
had changed from a cluster of shadows into 
a living thing. At first he thought it was 
a calf, then his nose told him that it was not, 
and further — this must have been instinct- — 
that it was wild. Now, a wild creature may 
be hunted, any dog will tell you that. 

The " long dog " left his hare and stole 
forward, and his right fore-paw had not 
finished its first stride when the thing faded 
back into the shadows like the vanishing of 
a puff of smoke. Then he knew it was no 
calf. Calves have lost the accomplishment 
— vital in the wild — of moving silently and 
quickly. 

Yet this was a fairly big thing and it had 
gone away with no more commotion than 
one would expect from a mouse. 

The beast was a roe-deer, though how on 
earth was the " long dog " to know that he 
was on one of the most strictly preserved 
deer forests in Scotland and that outsiders 
may not hunt roe-deer there? 

He dropped his nose and gave chase. 

Like the brushing away of a dream all 
234 



LONE LUCK 



his domestication slid from him. There 
moved through the delicate silver tracery of 
moonlight filtering between the boughs, with 
the true wolf's lope and the silent tread — 
the " privy paw " — the wild dog hunting his 
prey. 

But if the " long dog " thought to come 
by this new capture easily he was reckon- 
ing without his host. Of all the deer the 
roe is the most clever. All the craft of all 
the woods is his, and a complete absence of 
panic, so different from all his clan. From 
first to last the " long dog " never really 
saw the quarry, unless a transient gleam, 
as the flicker of a fading lamp whisked be- 
tween the gnarled boles, which marked the 
passing of the deer's light rump, or the fall- 
ing back of low boughs after the passage of 
something which had gone before, could be 
rightly called seeing. 

He had never been beaten by anything to 
the trail of which he had set his nose before, 
our " long dog," but at the end of an hour 
when he came back, led by the trail of the 
elusive roe, for the third time to the place 
235 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

whence he started, he came to the conclusion 
that he was being made a fool of and had 
best give it up. This he did, for all dogs 
hate being laughed at. 

As if this was not enough, he found that 
the foxes had finished what he had left — 
more than two-thirds — of his hare, and if he 
wished for more to eat before to-morrow 
night he must go catch it. He knew better 
than to hunt Hby day; had, in fact, always 
been trained for night work by the gentle- 
man of the " barrer," his first owner. 

Yet it must have been fate that led him 
to the foot of a gaunt hill pimpled with 
boulders — all loose — and scrub of the scrub- 
biest and ordained that in rounding a 
boulder not much larger than a house he 
should come smack upon not more than half 
a dozen hinds, red deer hinds, as big as 
donkeys, feeding and lying down. 

After the first start the whole group 
seemed, as it were, to be in suspension by 
this sudden lean fawn apparition out of the 
night. Then there was a snort, a rush, a 
swift shuffling of large forms in the half 
236 



LONE LUCK 




A Stag Climbing Slowly 
Up the Slope 

237 



fe> 



& 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

light, and the rest was a clatter of loose 
stones receding momentarily far up the hill- 
side. 

Borne by an impulse to do he knew not 
what the " long dog " sprang forward, shot 
clean up in the air, and landed upon the 
exact spot whence he had started. He had 
changed his mind at the last moment. 

Something was coming up the hillside. 

" The " long dog," still standing like a 
statue where he had landed, slowly turned 
his head. Then he was still. The pale, 
green- white radiance of the room, lighting 
and yet not lighting anything properly, 
cutting the shadows of boulder, bush, stone, 
stick, and even blade of grass in clean carved 
patterns of jet, showed the great, gaunt, 
red form of a stag climbing slowly up the 
slope. 

The huge, branched and gnarled antlers 
— their points shining white as ivory — 
weaved slowly from side to side as he swung 
his head with that rhythm of gait peculiar 
to deer; his mane stood out in a bristling 
ruff; his eyes gleamed red beneath the 



LONE LUCK 



shadow of his weapons, and he picked his 
way, for all his eighteen stone or more in 
weight, lightly and daintily as any fairy that 
ever trod and with the infinite grace in every 
pose which is the peculiar heritage of all the 
deer. He was a fourteen pointer, and per- 
haps the grandest stag in half a kingdom at 
that moment. Many, courtiers and kings, 
would have given much gold to bring him 
low. But the " long dog " saw in him only 
prey, or perhaps an enemy — the one is so 
often likely at any moment to become the 
other in the wild. 

Another stag roared suddenly in a glen 
opposite, and he of the huge head turned 
swiftly to hurl out a rasping, grunting, deep 
reverberating challenge. A single young 
hind broke back from the herd not far above 
and cantered down toward the stag that had 
roared first. The big fellow plunged for- 
ward as if to stop her, but pulled up short 
in his tracks with a snort of alarm, as an- 
swering snorts sounded from above and the 
glen below. 

A long swift shadow was gliding, fast as 
239 



P EOPLE OF THE WIL D 

■ I ■ ■■■■ Il —lllll l l l l I I II ——MM || , I L 

the shadow of a hurrying cloud glides, 
straight toward the young hind. It was the 
" long dog," stretched at full gallop, silent 
and ominous. 

The hind, bent on flirting against the 
wishes of her lord, heard the snorts and 
stopped with a pretty toss of her silken 
muzzle, wilful and rebellious. She knew the 
warning of the snorts, was aware of the 
danger " shouted " to her almost as plainly 
as words could speak from the harem above, 
her lord, and the new lover below together ; 
knew she, and heard she, but she would not 
go back. 

A second snort — shrill and whistling this 
time — and snort after snort from above and 
below; a clatter of stones; a splash as flying 
hoofs spurned a pool; a confusion among 
the shadows above and below, and rebellion 
gave place to fear — she was alone. 

No, not alone. What was that which 
raced toward her down the hill, raced as the 
shadow of a hawk races on the doomed bird? 
She started. The moon had gleamed on 
teeth, fangs bared for action as a sword is 
240 



LONE LUCK 



bared. She flung half round, glanced back, 
trembled, snorted, and fled. 

After the first grand bound — which was 
about eight feet high and ten long — the hind 
settled down into a swift gallop, a gallop 
little, if anything, slower than that of a hare 
at its quickest. By what miracle she 
avoided slipping down a dozen times on the 
treacherous shale, or kept from pitching for- 
ward and spoiling her dainty nose as 
boulder after boulder turned under her fly- 
ing hoofs, I know not, but she did. 

At the end of ten minutes she had not 
slackened speed one iota, but the " long 
dog " saw that she was altering her course. 
This had at first been down hill, then along 
it, then slightly uphill. She was, in fact, 
making a long sweep, intending to rejoin 
her herd, which was presumably somewhere 
over the other side of the ridge. 

Suddenly, as she breasted the slope, she 
gave a great bound. The drumming of her 
foe's feet came plainly to her backward- 
turned ears. The foe was nearer than be- 
fore, had, in fact, pouched half her start by 
241 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

taking an inner circle, and she had made a 
mistake. In the wild there is no room for 
mistakes; he who makes one may live, he 
may even survive a second, but never a third. 
Indeed few live even to risk a third. 

The hind now ran for her life. She had 
no further hope of rejoining the herd. 
Water was her only chance, and she made 
for it, over that infernally rough ground, at 
a speed that was at once magnificent and 
terrifying. Still the long shadow glided 
swiftly in her wake. In its course was no 
slackening nor quickening. It was just a 
steady rapid glide, straight as an arrow, si- 
lent as death, purposeful as fate. 

Between that and the coming to the lake 
lay an interval of uncounted time, a gap of 
blind and dizzy speed, an everlasting stream 
of landscape and things sliding past; of a 
flock of amazed sheep blundering up at their 
feet and scattering all whither bleatingly; 
of the badger at business with roots that fell 
sideways grunting strange oaths; of the 
wild-cat under a heather-tuft at business 
with something much less innocent than 
242 



LONE LUCK 



roots, which shot up like a fury through a 
trap, spitting and swearing worse oaths ; of 
the red bull standing alone in thought that 
they both ran into round a cliff-corner and 
over whose back the hind leaped clean, while 
the " long dog " shot — his heart in his mouth 
— under the bovine belly, and lastly of the 
ominous crouching human figure under a 
shattered Scotch pine loaded with nets and 
grouse — all these things whirled past them 
like pictures seen on a cinematograph. 

And then, below, in front, the lap, lap, 
lap of the waters of the lake, and the glitter 
of them in the moonlight. Not a hundred 
yards away was the lake, and the " long 
dog " was thirty yards behind. At his pres- 
ent rate of gaining on the quarry there was 
not half an atom of a chance of his reach- 
ing her. Once in the water that much 
chance vanished also. 

Then did the " long dog " show of what 
stuff he was made. A few lurchers have 
the trick, not many. It is to pursue for 
hours and not show their real speed ; to hold 
a reserve till the psychological moment. He 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

judged that to have arrived. Without a 
sound still and without warning, he " drew " 
up to the quarry for all the world as if he 
had been wound in on a string. Followed 
a gleam of fangs, a rush, a snort, a scurry, 
a burst and whirl of dust, a tangle of red and 
tan bodies, a flail-like kicking, and the two 
parted. 

For a moment the " long dog " appeared, 
whirling and circling like a red Indian, 
round the deer, now on the defensive and 
her haunches. Then the tangle renewed it- 
self, and the moon mercifully sank and 
plunged all things in a treble-welted dark- 
ness, and the quick, blanketing Scotch mist 
swept down and completed the obscurity. 

Dawn found a keeper standing over the 
carcass of a hind on the shore of the lake. 
His clenched fists were raised to Heaven, 
but the words which fell from his lips were 
anything but Heavenly. The rocky ground 
gave no sign of the footsteps, or the nature 
of the murderer, but a small portion of the 
murdered one had been eaten, and it is said 
that ten collie dogs vanished mysteriously 
244 



LONE LUCK 



that week — how the keeper alone knows — 
because of it. 

During the day the " long dog's " dreams 
in the heart of a sea of heather were broken 
from time to time by the vicious slapping 
reports of the deerstalkers' rifles. He lay 
low and took notes, one of which was that 
the range of firearms, which he had always 
been taught to believe was around forty 
yards, had miraculously quadrupled itself 
at the very least. He also marked the 
course of a wounded stag, and when dusk 
had fallen and the bats had begun to weave 
patterns across the near sky and a single 
nightjar was flapping slowly to and fro, he 
stole out. 

Across an open space washed in the pur- 
ple of heather he took his way and down to a 
hollow where he plunged from the light of 
evening into the cool gray-green shade of 
bog-myrtle whose scent rose all about him 
like lavender, where deeper still the rank 
grass parted with a soft sweeping of my 
lady's skirt, and the tall feathery plumes of 
the cotton grass waved stately above him, 
245 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

marking his course to the eyes of a watch- 
ful buzzard, wheeling, eagle-like, on great 
still wings, who once before that day had 
dined from the " long dog's " bounty, and 
took a last look at his course ere going to 
rest on some dizzy fastness of the higher 
mountains. But the " long dog " was after 
water and found it anon in this low soft 
place. Truly, there was the lake, but gen- 
tlemen of the night do not drink openly on 
the unsheltered shore of any lake when rifles 
are abroad and the sun still flings blood-red 
stains across the glassy depths. 

The " long dog " here wallowed neck deep 
in water, drinking full, and afterwards, by 
rolling in the deep green tussocks of deer 
grass, scoured his coat as though it had been 
gone over with a wire-brush. He was but 
marking time while the day passed, and not 
till the last ring ouzel had gone to roost and 
the last azure dragon fly had darted athwart 
the shallows like some jewelled arrow fired 
from a fairy bow invisible, and the first long- 
drawn notes of an owl gave the night call 
that should awaken all the banned, the out- 
246 



LONE LUCK 



laws from their lairs, did he move from the 
gloom among the bog myrtles. Then up he 
came through the delicate pink haze of the 
cross-leaved heather, to firmer ground where 
he plunged by one of the innumerable game- 
paths into the rolling sea of purple that 
marked the beginning of the true heather 
and the high moors. 

Nothing, I think, was in his mind then of 
specially evil import, for he spent the night 
coursing hares — the finicking, limping, blue 
hares of the mountains — and caught two, 
one of which he ate. He also investigated 
the higher slopes and discovered a new 
world, a world of clouds, air refined and in- 
toxicating as champagne, of ptarmigan and 
raven among other things, and a rocky 
desolation, dangerous and of forbidding as- 
pect, where an outlaw might retire when 
things looked very black. 

Before dawn he had returned to his lair 
of the previous day, but got little rest by 
reason of the deer stalkers. There is, to an 
Outlaw, no joy in waking to the smacking 
report of a Mauser sporting magazine rifle, 
247 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

or the deeper, shorter cough of the .450 Ex- 
press, and the remarks of a bullet all alone 
and singing in a high key to itself as it comes 
sailing down over the purple sea of heather, 
from God and he who pressed the trigger 
alone knows where, are scarcely calculated 
to improve sleep. 

Like the fox of the fable, our " long dog " 
slept with one eye open, and it did not re- 
quire the crash of a nineteen-stone stricken 
stag, falling in the heather not fifty yards 
away, to bring him to a state of nerve tension 
and alertness calculated to strain the most 
equable temper. He shifted his station 
three times that day within a radius of a 
heather patch of ten acres, because of men 
and deer and once a collie tracking deer, 
who nevertheless nearly gave him away. 

That evening as the lurcher slouched 
down through the bog myrtles it was far too 
dark for shooting. The owls had been out 
some time, the bats, those that did not re- 
main on the wing all night, were already re- 
turning to " hang up," a fox and a pole-cat 
had already gone to the same place to drink 
248 



LONE LUCK 



and had come away, and the badger, the last 
of the outlaws to sally on foray, had already 
slid by, a long, gray, grunting shadow, down 
the hill, and : 

" Night busy at her dawn 

Begins it with a star." 

There was no lingering in the damp place 
to-night. The " long dog " had a%purpose. 
A hasty drink and toilet, with the luxur- 
ious roll cut out, sufficed. He slouched off 
by the path taken by all the outlaws, or at 
any rate most of them, not uphill this time, 
but down. Down in this land meant man 
and civilization ; up, the wild and desolation. 

He hurried, the " long dog " hurried. 
He slouched indeed, but it was a quick 
slouch. You picture him, two green eyes — 
seen only at certain angles — and a pattering 
sound hurrying through the gloom, which, 
unless he got on a sky-line, covered the rest 
of him. 

Down he went below the last outposts of 
the heather; down through hazy patches of 
palm sallow and herb willow; down through 
249 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

woods of ranked and serried larch; and so 
to columned beach and billowy oak — where 
he saw groups of fox-gloves gleaming 
palely, and once a ghostly white upright 
form that was, though he cared not, a white 
fox-glove. At length all gave place to com- 
mon, tufted with prickly gorse, eaten bare 
as a lawn by — sheep. There they were, 
half seen, half guessed in the blackness. 
Not that the "long dog " needed sight, the 
sweet sickly smell and the sound as of a 
multitude breathing were enough for him. 

I like to believe that there was in him 
then no real thought of doing evil; that he 
was merely hunting as he had been trained 
to hunt; that, in fact, he had no thought of 
coming back to that spot again. Certainly 
he passed on as if that business were his one 
idea. 

He came to a farm. 

By devious paths and with much caution 
— not, by the way, apparent — he encircled 
that farm. He tested the wind from every 
quarter, and finding taint of neither man 
nor dog, entered. 

250 



LONE LUCK 



It was an orchard. 

Heavy on the air hung the sweet scent of 
apples, but he had not come for anything so 
innocent as apples. There were, just where 
the orchard gave on a rick-yard, small 
houses, and the scent around them, though 
heavy, was anything but sweet. They were 
small. Fowls lived there. These, also, he 
left alone for the very good reason that they 
were shut up. 

Further investigation of the farm re- 
vealed two cows, a calf, a cat, and a pig, and 
then he happened on a great find. 

In a quiet place, high out of ordinary 
harm's way, were wired-in hutches, and in 
these were cockerels fattening. I say 
" were " advisedly, because the leap of the 
" long dog " was very high indeed, and 
when he left that place, which he did sud- 
denly and hurriedly, one of those cockerels 
went, entirely without joy, with him. He 
had, in the vernacular, " landed a red 'un," 
and him, when he had put half a mile be- 
tween his own lean body and the farm, he 
consumed with great gusto. 
251 



PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

But another dog, big and not by any 
means lean, came after him from the farm, 
hot foot on his track. He was a great dog 
and savage, larger and heavier than the 
" long dog," and he meant murder. 

It was a grand fight. At least, I imagine 
it was, for there was no light to view it by, 
and it lasted three minutes. In the end 
the " long dog n went away, and the farmer 
found the mangled remains of the other next 
day. 

The " long dog," urged by the experience 
of previous fights no doubt, hurried away 
at a rapid lope, but fate was unkind, I think, 
in ordaining that his path should take him 
clean through the scattered flock of sheep, 
which, as you will remember, he had en- 
countered earlier in the night. I don't 
know whether it was the temper consequent 
on his several wounds — which hurt abomin- 
ably — or the sudden excitement caused by 
woolly bodies stampeding about him in the 
dark, or some sudden awakening of the old 
wild hatred of the truly wild carnivora for 
all domesticated animals. Who indeed 



LONE LUCK 



shall say? Anyway, the result was the 
same; the " long dog " forgot himself. 

It is written that he who slays domestic 
birds in Britain commits a theft, but he who 
slays domestic beasts in the same fashion 
had safer have killed their owner. Time 
was when the killing of another man's sheep 
was punishable by death. To-day the 
penalty has been shifted to the wild folk. 
All the country-side stands up on its hind 
legs and raves if a sheep is killed. And the 
" long dog," I regret to say, killed several. 
Mercifully the darkness hid the horror of 
the " worry," but the shepherd found a reek- 
ing slaughter-pen next morning, for, as 
generally happens in such cases, the " long 
dog " had for the time being gone clean mad 
with the lust of slaughter. 

The sun, golden, wide-eyed, and splendid, 
shot warm bars as it rose, down through the 
tangled heather by the lake next day and 
discovered the " long dog " asleep in his lair, 
but that was the last day he spent there. 
Next night the murder of sheep was re- 
ported from another quarter, and the night 
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PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

after three fat ducks, which had been shut 
up carefully on a hill-farm in the evening, 
had vanished into nowhere by the morning. 
A turkey, another fowl, a kid, and a 
wounded stag met a like fate during the 
next week or so, and men awoke to the fact 
that there was something among them, not 
foxes, which ought to be killed. 

They thought it was more than one beast, 
owing to the " long dog's " crafty habit of 
doing his killing, say ten miles south of his 
lair on one night, and a dozen north of it the 
next. He made forays to every point of the 
compass, but always in an opposite direc- 
tion each night. Many keepers and farm- 
ers spent much money on poison to worry 
his innards, but he had long ago learned 
the wolf's scarcely edifying but most effec- 
tive method of getting rid of poison. Hours 
also were spent in setting traps to entertain 
him, but he had poached in woods bristling 
with traps all his checkered life — he could 
smell steel. 

As for lying in wait for him with guns as 
some did, it was pathetic; where he came 
from keepers swarmed and the work of 
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LONE LUCK 



avoiding them had been brought to a fine 
art. No, our " long dog " was above all 
these things. In fact, it is not too much to 
say that he ceased to be a poaching thief and 
became a picturesque bandit. 

One night he had been out late and was 
still a mile from home when suddenly the 
night died and rocks and things began to 
stand out of the darkness receding. The 
sky paled. The little matter of three fowls 
in a distant farm and of the settling of a 
blood feud with a collie who had been set to 
guard the lives of sheep, but failed to guard 
his own, had delayed him somewhat. 

The " long dog " hurried. 

Day rushed on, striding from hill-top to 
hill-top; an eagle launched from some sum- 
mit above the cliffs and started his aerial 
patrol; a kite awoke and sailed sublime in 
the new, raw light, and with a rush — almost 
an audible clash — a spear of fire shot out 
from the east, a blinding torrent of red and 
gold followed, and before he knew it our 
" long dog " found himself bathed in sun- 
shine. 

He brokq into a gallop. 
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PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

Phtt! 

A bullet — a copper-capped, .318, acceler- 
ated magazine rifle bullet — spat dirt into his 
eyes. It had come without warning, with- 
out a sign, and its own report followed. 
That alone saved the " long dog." It told 
him which way to fly from the death he could 
not see, and the man who, lying by a rocky 
pool waiting for a stag to drink at dawn, 
could lob a bullet seven hundred yards. 
That man was probably the best shot in the 
Highlands, but the " long dog " was prob- 
ably the swiftest runner. He became a tan 
streak drawn across the landscape and 
moved from one valley into another. I 
dare not give you the infinitesimal fraction 
of time occupied in that moving. 

Still, though he escaped, it was a bad 
business. It fixed his identity. It made 
him known. From a rumor he became a 
tangible dog. His foes knew the appear- 
ance of this living calamity, and he was 
forced to shift his lair to the desolation of 
the upper mountains in consequence. 

I like to think of him alone up there with 
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LONE LUCK 



only the eagles and the ravens and the 
ptarmigan for company, and of how he 
grandly swooped down upon the valleys and 
took his toll night after night and week 
after week, but especially I like to think of 
the end and to know that it was not alto- 
gether ignoble or unworthy. 

A stag roared on the hillside. A chal- 
lenge came from the valley, and the stag 
went down roaring. A rifle barked in the 
valley, and the stag came up the hillside 
through the suddenly swooping hill. These 
things the " long dog," peering from a cave, 
beheld, and when the light became too bad 
for shooting he went and sniffed at the 
antlered monarch's trail. 

Then he dropped his nose and slid away 
on the line of scent — not indeed exactly on 
it for the wind had blown it quite fifty yards 
to one side of the real path taken by the 
stag, but still it was near enough to hunt by. 
To-night man and his creatures should rest, 
he would hunt royal game like a very king, 
forgetting that a king's privilege is to be 
slain as well as to slay. . 
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PEOPLE OF THE WILD 




Alone Up There With Only the Eagles and 

Havens 

258 



LONE LUCK 



The stag had breasted the crest and taken 
down the opposite slope. When, however, 
he discovered — he alone knows how — that a 
new death was on his trail he again turned 
uphill, as a stag wounded in the f orequarters 
invariably and naturally will. Two hours 
after the start, an evil, spitting wild cat be- 
held a wounded stag, brown with sweat, gal- 
loping slowly round the shoulder of a hill. 
Blood had dried on his chest, and he was 
lame in the right foreleg, but his wound was 
apparently more painful than deadly. He 
looked neither to the right nor left, but 
passed straight on. Fifteen minutes later 
the same cat saw following the same path 
the loose, slouching form of the " long dog." 
He, too, was chocolate-colored with sweat, 
and he, too, looked neither to the right nor 
to the left, but passed on over the shoulder 
at his tireless gallop — a form as determined 
and implacable as fate itself. 

Four hours from the start one of those 

large gray foxes that haunt the heights 

stood aside for a moment from his path to 

let by a big, raking stag, head down, tongue 

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PEOPLE OF THE WILD 

out, bloodshot eyed, who moved at little 
more than a walk up hill and staggered 
drunkenly on over the brow. Four hours 
and ten minutes from the start the same fox 
was amazed to see a slouching, raking dog, 
head down, tongue lolling, plastered with 
dirt, red-eyed, stumbling blindly along on 
the same path at a slow, lame canter. He 
too tottered over the brow and disappeared, 
and on his face was a look of determination 
that suggested he would continue to hunt 
that stag till the crack of doom. 

Seven hours and ten minutes from the 
start, in the raw light of naked dawn, a 
gamekeeper, who had come there to wait for 
a fox returning to his den, was frozen with 
stupefaction at sight of a drenched " royal " 
stag and a drenched lurcher dog lying to- 
gether on the brink of a mountain pool. 
There in the stark light the tragedy was re- 
vealed of two beasts whom no man had slain, 
whom no wound had killed; the superbly 
dogged hunter, and the doggedly superb 
hunted side by side, at full length, grand 
specimens of their race, masterpieces of 
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LONE LUCK 



nature in the being — dead. Dead? How? 
Their hearts had burst. 

Then as the keeper turned away, from a 
gaunt up-flung fang of rock, cut as in the 
very coal against the raw blood-red of flam- 
ing sunrise, a raven croaked : 

"Nevermore!" 

It was the end. 



END 



261 



OCT 



M 



1911 



One copy del. to Cat. Div. 






LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




005 508 510 9 



